


The Operative Word

by road_rhythm



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Consent Issues, Fuck Or Die, Future Fic, M/M, Post-Canon, Season/Series 15
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:08:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21833437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/road_rhythm/pseuds/road_rhythm
Summary: The procedure to break a succubus curse is not overly specific: it requires another person and an orgasm.No problem, Sam thinks.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 264
Kudos: 487





	The Operative Word

**Author's Note:**

> For [dimeliora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimeliora), who many months ago made the mistake of prompting me with _fuck or die_.
> 
> Great thanks to [themegalosaurus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/themegalosaurus) and [interstitial](https://archiveofourown.org/users/interstitial) for betaing.
> 
> This is set post-S15 after some vaguely imagined resolution to S15's plot conflict, and will no doubt get soundly jossed.

Two boys are playing Twenty Questions in a car on the side of the road.

"Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

This is the younger one, in the backseat. His knees are accordioned up, his feet planted on the black upholstery. His calves and ankles are very thin.

"None of the above."

"Noun or verb?"

"Noun."

"Is it alive?"

"No."

Not alive, but not mineral. Abstract, then. That leaves a lot of categories.

"Is it a concept?"

"No."

The boy, leaning against the back passenger side door, frowns. An abstract noun that is not a concept. "Time?"

"Is that your guess or are you asking?"

"I'm asking. Is it, like, a date or something."

The older one is propped against the front driver's side door. They face each other diagonally over the line of the car's bench seat. It is well into spring, and the windows are open. Frogs, crickets, and other night sounds filter in. "Yes."

"Yes, it's a date?"

"Yes, it's a date. That's two questions you just torched, there, Sam."

"No, it isn't!"

"Yes, it's a date _or something,_ and yes, it's a date."

"You're a jerk, Dean."

"Fourteen left, Sammy."

They are on their way to meet their father. It's a three-day trip. Outside the car are only fields, hedgerows, and the things that live in them; no traffic passes on the two-lane blacktop. The air smells strongly of soil.

Sam has sharp features drawn in the soft lines of adolescence. He is sixteen, barely. Dean is twenty. His face is young, too. To Sam it seems unattainably mature now, but many years later he will look at a picture of his brother taken not long after this, and it will be hard to believe that either of them was ever this close to childhood.

"Is it a date that repeats?" Sam asks.

It's obvious Dean was hoping that he wouldn't. "Yeah."

"Is it a holiday?"

"Sort of?"

"That's weak."

They're playing with a twist: nothing that exists can be the object. Only imaginary or non-existent objects are permitted. They always play this way.

"Is it annual?"

"Yeah."

"Is it in winter or fall?"

"No."

"Is it in summer?"

"No."

"How can a date not exist," says Sam, more a complaint than a question.

"Wouldn't you like to know."

Spring could mean any of four months. "Is it in March?" This is an incredibly inefficient strategy Sam's burning questions on, but he's annoyed and doesn't care.

"Nope." Dean slings one leg up on the bench seat so Sam has to look at his foot.

"Is it in April?"

"Yeah." Begrudging.

Sort-of-a-holiday in April suggests April Fools', but it can't be that, because that exists. Then again, all of the dates that make up April have the same defect of existing. Sam already has a feeling that he's going to hate his brother when the answer's revealed.

A smack and a curse from the front seat. "Blood-sucking bastards."

"They always go for you," Sam says smugly.

"Yeah, 'cause your blood is gross. C'mon, ask me. Unless you're _giving up,_ of course."

Sam drops his own leg along the back of the bench seat so it's lying alongside Dean's and hears his brother's indrawn breath. "April 31st."

"No."

"Christmas in April."

"You're thinking of Christmas in _July,_ jeez." Dean shoves Sam's knee with the side of his foot.

"Fine, just tell me."

The answer bursts out of Dean under such pressure it's clear he's been dying to make this joke for hours, if not days. "It's April 1st on Chuck Norris's calendar 'cause Chuck Norris's calendar skips straight from March 31st to April 2nd 'cause nobody fools Chuck Norris."

Sam cannot see his brother's face right now with their knees in the way, but he doesn't have to to know that Dean has a shit-eating grin plastered from ear to over-sized ear. "Are you fucking kidding me?"

"You're out of questions."

"Chuck Norris jokes are lame, Dean."

"Chuck Norris tells Simon what to do."

"Please stop."

"Chuck Norris knows Victoria's secret."

"I can feel myself getting dumber with every word you speak."

"The Holy Grail has never been recovered because nobody's stupid enough to ask Chuck Norris to give up his coffee mug."

"Brain cells, dying."

"Chuck Norris doesn't cheat death; he wins fair and square."

Sam twists his foot and pinches Dean's thigh hard between socked toes. Dean yelps.

"Fine, I've got one for you," says Sam.

"Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

"None of the above."

"Noun or verb?"

"Noun."

"Is it a concept or idea?"

"No."

"Is it a date?"

"No."

Dean gives him a _what the fuck_ look, then goes back to thinking.

"I'll give you a hint," Sam says viciously. "It's made up of words. Not good words, but words."

Dean scowls at him. "Is it—?"

"A joke bad enough you won't think it's insanely witty? Yep."

"Your face is witty." Dean takes his leg back.

Sam does, too. "That's not actually a bad thing, Dean, good job."

"Sorry, I meant 'zitty.'"

"Bite me."

"No thanks, you reek."

They lie there for a while. Sam listens to the crickets in last season's cornstalks and wishes for a blanket. It's warm, but it's still only spring, and although all-seasons car-camping is nothing new in his life, he only really enjoys it in summer.

He's just starting to drowse when Dean's voice breaks the silence. "Got one for you."

Something in his tone pulls Sam back to fully awake. He's not sure what it is. It's different from before. "Okay."

"Shoot."

"Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

"None of the above."

"Noun or verb?"

"Noun."

"Is it a concept?"

"Yeah."

Sam considers. An abstract concept that doesn't exist. That could cover a lot of ground. "Does anybody believe in it?"

"Yeah."

"Do a lot of people believe in it?"

"Yeah."

 _God_ is such an obvious play here that Sam almost guesses that, but he holds back. It's _too_ obvious. And Sam has never disagreed with the sentiment out loud, so there's no reason Dean should bring it up. Unless he's somehow found out—? No. No, not likely. If he knew Sam has been dabbling in prayer he'd be making infinite comedic hay, and whatever his mood is, it isn't mocking.

Dean's humming something, so fragmentary Sam doubts he even notices he's doing it. His fingers tap a rhythm absently and almost imperceptibly where they're laced across his middle. Sam knows all the same songs as his brother, but he can't place it. "Are people taught to believe in it?"

The fingers on Dean's stomach fall still. "I dunno. Sometimes, I guess. But mostly I think they just want to."

"Like, naturally."

"Yeah."

Dean might or might not count that one as a question. That half-formed tune is in Sam's head now. What the hell is that?

"Why do they want to believe in it?"

"Yes or no questions, dumbass."

"Does believing in it do something practical, or does it just make them feel better?"

"What, feeling good's not a good enough reason?"

The musical fragment hooks into something in Sam's brain. _Feeling good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues._

"Did Janis Joplin sing about it?"

No answer.

Sam sits up. "Dean? Do you— You really believe that?"

There's the rustle and slap of someone rearranging a leather jacket into a better pillow. "Believe what? That hedonism's the way to go? Hell, yeah."

Sam doesn't even engage with that attempt to play it off. "No such thing as freedom? How can you believe that?"

Dean pauses. "Read about this guy in a magazine, Phineas Gage." One hand tears a hangnail off an opposite finger and flicks it somewhere. "He got an iron bar through his head working on the railroad. Survived it, but turned into a completely different dude. Like, his friends from before literally said he wasn't him anymore."

Sam knows about it. The article he knows about it from also used this curiosity to make some kind of argument about free will and human identity; maybe they read the same _Scientific American_. There's no way Dean has been sitting around brooding about whether freedom is an illusion because of some magazine. "So? People also have strokes or get dementia or schizophrenia. But we know we're more than just brains and chemicals. We have to be. There's ghosts."

"Why's a werewolf eat hearts?"

"Well," Sam says slowly, "they're a kind of animal, I guess."

"'Because they're evil' is the answer I was looking for, but sure. Either way, we get bitten, boom, that could be you or me."

"We could get hit by a car, too. Just because things happen doesn't mean we can't make our own decisions about what to do about them."

"Where are we?"

"I dunno, Nebraska somewhere."

"What are we doing here?"

"We're going to meet Dad."

"Why are we going to meet Dad?"

"Because there's a hunt."

"And there's a hunt because Dad looked for it because Dad knew to look for it because of what happened to our family when you were just a baby. If it hadn't, we wouldn't know, we'd just be oblivious in a house somewhere like all the other people who don't know evil's just waiting to rip into them. We didn't choose our life any more than they did. I mean, I'm glad we got it, ours is definitely more badass, but we wouldn't be here without all the levers and carrots and sticks."

"So, what." Sam stares at the outline of the dome light in the car's dark ceiling. "We're all just rats in cages?"

"Hey, you're the Smashing Pumpkins fan, not me."

"We do what we want," says Sam. "Just because we don't know everything in every situation or bad things happen doesn't mean we don't make choices because we want things."

"Sure. What makes us want what we want?"

In the car, despite the windows being cracked, their breaths are closely confined. Their presences are pressed close up against each other, every nose-scratch and neck-crack and fart caught between glass and vinyl and dashboard panels. When Dean touches a split in his lip with his tongue, Sam is hyper-aware of it, and when Sam stretches to feel the pull in the muscles of his belly and between his ribs, he can hear and see Dean noticing it in the sloped reflection of the windshield. All this has always felt like it was leading somewhere.

But _nothin don't mean nothin if it ain't free._

"Anyway. I'm hitting the sack." Dean maneuvers his body into something roughly horizontal, head against the door, knees bent.

Slowly, Sam also lies back down. The window crank digs into his skull. "Yeah, okay."

The window crank is an issue. Sam wriggles down so that his head is flat on the seat with his knees bent way up. Then he accepts that that position isn't going to work for him, bows to necessity, and pulls his hoodie off and crams it between his head and the door.

Now he's cold.

A ball of leather hits him in the face. Sam reaches up and pulls it off. It's Dean's jacket. "Don't you want this?" he asks.

"Nah, I got my sweatshirt up here, I'm good."

"If you're sure."

"Sure I'm sure."

"All right."

There's a little more rustling, then they both settle down and still.

"G'night, Sammy."

Dean's voice is quiet.

"Goodnight, Dean." Sam closes his eyes. "See you in the morning."

* * *

* * *

The lili is in Easton, Missouri. It's racked up a kill count of four: three men, one woman, all perplexing the ME with death by hyperthermia in the middle of spring. There's also a werewolf in Washington, however, and Dean's been going stir-crazy for about a week, so: they split up.

They're used to it, by now. It will never be their preference, but all those months with the bunker so full got them accustomed to leading their own expeditions because the math of the situation said that other people—Mom, and Jack, and Cas, and refugees newly minted as hunters—needed one of them worse than they needed each other. The math says the same thing now. Time was when they'd never have hunted separately no matter how rocky things got between them, but now it's not too unusual even though everything's good.

Sam feels a strange sense of loss in that, even as he enjoys the freedom to set the driver's seat as far back as he wants and tune the radio to NPR. Sometimes he thinks Dean feels something of the same, but he might be imagining it.

"Reince Bryerson, 41," says the Buchanan County ME, handing a clipboard to Sam over Reince's corpse. The victim is tall, ginger, stringy with a spare tire around the middle. His skin is mottled as if from long contact with heat. "It was odd. It's been a little warm for this time of year, sure, but last year was warmer, and we didn't have any heatstroke cases then. Not even non-fatal ones, I checked."

Sam leafs through the clipboard. "You extracted a foreign body?"

"Yeah, from his leg." The ME's maybe ten years older than Sam, but her hair's already threaded with silver. Strange to think he's so close to that, himself. She frowns. "Did you want to see it, Agent?"

"Please."

She shrugs and crosses to a specimen cabinet, returning with a small plastic container. "It didn't contribute to cause of death," she says. "It was just under the skin, definitely not life-threatening. I figure maybe his lawn mower threw it while he was mowing."

Something clicks against the plastic as Sam takes the container. "I thought he was found in his bed."

"Well, he was, but he must have been doing something physical outside to work himself into heatstroke. Our best guess is he came inside to try to cool off, but it was already too late."

Police photos of Reince show him naked in his bed, his clothes on the floor of the master bath. With no signs of any other person having been at the scene and hyperthermia as a cause of death, Sam can see how they might arrive at that interpretation. He turns the container over in his fingers and a dark shape rattles within. "Do you mind?" At the ME's nod, he pops the lid.

The thing is an equilateral triangle about two centimeters long on each side. Two of the edges are sharp and slightly serrated, like an obsidian arrow point, and there's a cardioid groove in the middle. The cardioid is distinctive and reminds Sam of something he can't quite place.

"It's keratin," the ME offers. "Not sure what from; I kind of want to run it by a zoologist just 'cause it's interesting, but the university's two hours away, you know?"

Sam snaps a couple of pictures and hands the box back to the ME. "No worries," he says. "I'm sure it's like you said. Probably from the lawn mower."

Reince's bedroom smells; the man had no family, and when the coroner's office removed the body, they left the sweat-soaked sheets in place. They must have closed the window, though. In the photos of Reince _in situ,_ it's open. Sam checks the windowsill. Two sets of three parallel scratches mar the peeling paint, each matched by one deep puncture on the sill's underside. He nods to himself.

The scarcity of Reince's social life makes it easy to piece together a picture of his last few days on Earth: the takeout containers, the Netflix queue, and one receipt for a Starlite Lounge on Highway 31 from the night of his death. Freddie Vellez's credit card statement and Maddie Nielsen's roommate place those two at the Starlite, as well. Open and shut.

Dean calls that evening. "Man, I _hate_ logging roads," he says.

"Have you ever considered—wait for it—renting a car?"

"The fuck is wrong with you," comes Dean's good-natured reply. It's an old, comfortably broken-in conversation; if either of them were going to sleep, it'd be as good as bedroom slippers. "Anyway. Got a couple of maybes, going by where the victims crossed paths. The kills are pretty disorganized. I don't think the guy who's doing it knows he's doing it, if you follow."

"Poor bastard."

"Yeah. What about you?"

Sam sticks another post-it up beside his photo of the triangular dart the ME found. Lilin are well-documented, but they're rare on this continent—this might be the first in almost a century—and he wants to add some details to the dossiers available. "It's definitely a lili," he says. "Pretty sure I know where she's picking her victims, headed there in about an hour."

"Which kind are they, again?"

"Uh, well, arguably, they're the original kind." Of succubus, they both mean. "Mesopotamian, quasi-demonic corporeal desert spirits. The lore says they have the body of a woman and the feet of a bird."

"That's hot."

"Strictly speaking, yeah, it is; she poisons her targets with darts to make them crave her, then those who couple with her are, uh, 'consumed by the flames of their desire.' Which, the vics are dying of heatstroke, so apparently that isn't metaphorical."

He knows the joke Dean's going to make before he makes it. "Going out with a bang. How do you kill it?"

"Bronze or flint to the heart."

"They do any of that mind trick stuff sirens do?"

Dean's trying to sound nonchalant and failing. Sirens will never be something either of them can quite be blasé about, but here at least Sam can put his brother's mind to rest. "No, accounts back to the clay tablet days pretty much agree they feed by ambush. They have to come in through the window of an unprotected home, so I guess there's not a lot of point trying to be subtle. Honestly, they're not all that lethal; killing it breaks the spell, and the victim should be fine after that provided they get the curse out of their system."

Dean snickers on the other end of the line. Lilin are rare enough in this hemisphere that few hunters have even heard of them, but the curse Sam's referring to is pretty much what succubi are famous for in general. Sam rolls his eyes.

"What's your time line?" he asks Dean.

"Another day or two, depending on which lead pans out. You?"

"Probably about the same. Stay safe," Sam tells him.

"Don't bang Tweety Bird," says Dean.

They hang up.

The Starlite Lounge is old-school, along with old-everything else. It was constructed in the 1980s and has drop-tile ceiling, splitting vinyl booths, and a 12x12 foldable dance floor at one end where a Casio and some amps lie quiescent. Spaghetti and garlic bread are on offer. Craft beers are not.

Sam tucks himself into a corner booth with a good view and pretends to sip a Miller Lite. He's not paranoid about roofies; the beer's just lukewarm and flat. The Starlite really is a lounge, not a strip club, and these days most of the waitresses that circulate are dressed more for practicality than allure. The only consistent nod to the past dress code immortalized in a framed photo of the establishment's glory days is low, strappy heels. Sam watches one woman in her mid-thirties absently massage her foot while chatting with an older couple who appear to be regulars.

One waitress, though, is wearing thigh-high pleather boots instead. Unlike her coworkers, who talk and laugh and thwap plastic-covered menus against their thighs while they stand around, she walks looking straight ahead with blank eyes. There's something almost robotic about her. She appears to have only one table.

The table is a one-spot, a kid who can't be more than early twenties: the youngest customer in the building, the one with the most life force. Reince was past forty, but it's not difficult to see how he might have fit that profile on the night he visited the Starlite. There's a lot of people here who look like they've been hitting the heat lamp buffet since the place was built.

All of the victims died in their homes, so Sam considers pickpocketing the kid's wallet for an address and laying an ambush there, but he decides against it. There are too many variables. Better to follow and watch.

The kid—Charlie McKay, by his junk mail—turns out to live on Main Street in an old clapboard building that's got a hardware store on the first floor and the upper story subdivided into apartments. The apartments are accessible by external staircases, which is good. Each one has three windows facing different compass points, which sucks.

The only way to really get eyes on all three of the lili's potential entry points is to break into the steeple of the church across the street. It's not an ideal solution, but Sam will just have to hope he can close the distance fast enough. He settles in at a vent in the belfry and waits.

It's pushing midnight when he sees her. She's barely a suggestion of movement against the sky, something that dips and flutters jaggedly from the clouds toward the east window. If the moon hadn't come out from the clouds mere seconds before, he might have missed it entirely.

He takes the belfry's spiral staircase in four leaps and sprints. Easton is a farming town and it's planting season; there is no one here to see him or raise a ruckus as he pounds across the cracked asphalt and up the apartment's wooden stairs. The _For Rent_ sign in the other apartment's window suggests there aren't even neighbors to hear him kick in the door.

For all Sam's fast, though, the lili is faster. By the time he bursts in, Charlie is already flat on his back next to his living room coffee table, boxers around his ankles, gazing up slack-jawed and panting. Sam can see where his erect penis pumps like a sewing machine needle between two scrawny thighs clad in feathers. It glistens with fluids.

The lili turns with a screech. Whatever limited glamor allows her to move through public spaces like the Starlite, it's gone now. Sam barely has time to clock the giant bat wings or the serpentine tail tipped with a familiar triangular dart before she's in the air.

It's not large, the apartment's living room. The lili bounces off the ceiling and the walls as she bobs and weaves, screeching. Sam drops and rolls.

A dart streaks past his cheek. He glances up: the vic is gasping like a dying fish, an unnatural red flush rolling out over his skin from his groin. The lili is coiling her tail in midair, readying to shoot again. The coffee table, Charlie's gangling body, and two pairs of shoes obstruct the floor between Sam and her. He ducks and another dart _pock_ s into the soft arm of the couch.

That tail has to come off before he can stab her. Through the doorway to the kitchen, he can see the outline of a fridge and the contents of the counters. He zigzags his way toward it.

It's a cramped little kitchen. The bronze dagger is lousy for throwing, but Sam throws it anyway to make the lili dive to one side. While she's shrieking her displeasure about that, he scrambles through the kitchen door and wedges himself into the space between refrigerator and countertop. He can already hear her wings beating after him.

The tail appears first, swinging over the top of the fridge to take aim at cornered prey. Sam brings Charlie's butcher knife up in an arc.

Her scream rattles the dishes in the drying rack. The tail falls to the linoleum floor, where it thrashes, looping and flopping, until the end of it rears up and points itself at Sam.

The dart hits him in the stomach. Immediately he falls to his knees, not from pain but from an intense bloom of heat. It feels like a fist grabbed his cock and yanked. The organ is rigid in under two seconds. The lili keeps screeching, but it's different now, wordless coos mixed in, something half angry, half beckoning. Not that she needs to beckon him. He is crawling toward her as fast as he can with his pants around his thighs.

What he feels for the lili is like and unlike any other sexual desire he's ever felt. He recognizes the sensation, even if the intensity is beyond unnatural, yet it's so impersonal that not even his encounters from his time while soulless map onto it. It's a mindless, animal urge. He's lucid, and he knows that reaching his goal is death for both him and the boy on the floor, but trying to resist is like moving through treacle.

The succubus is coming, shuffling toward him on bird knees with the stump of her tail dumping ichor all over the carpet. Sam lifts an arm to backhand her away, but a burst of arousal like someone jerking on a barbed hook in the root of his cock has him collapsing back to the floor with a moan. The intensity of the feeling does nothing to blot out his humiliation. Once in a truck stop on I-55 and circumstances better not described, Sam lost control of his bowels with a live audience, and this is worse.

Fluffy owl-feet begin to climb his legs. The talons are ticklish through denim. Fluids drip caustic and cold onto his thigh. Bronze glitters by the TV stand, barely more than arm's reach away. His groin hurts. The lili's ammoniac cunt is so near, _so near,_ and Sam wants it. He wants to die and disappear for wanting it. His mind is clear even as his body burns, and that's his only chance and the worst thing about this.

Charlie's head turns toward him on the carpet. He stares and his mouth works as the red flush over his body starts to curdle into purple. There's a beat-up pair of boots on the floor between them. They're the same brand as Dean's.

Sam grits his teeth, twists his body, and grabs the dagger.

The lili's face goes slack when he buries it in her heart. A smell like desert dust crackles through the room; the body does not slump but goes rigid, rapidly lightening as her flesh pulls in and desiccates.

The desire dies with her. Sam feels the blood draining out of his erection, abrupt yet so much slower than it surged in, and the hard edge of his belt where it's twisted under his thighs.

The victim is wheezing on the floor, the flush rapidly retreating down his body though the ghost of the erythema remains. Sam steadies himself against the wall as he pushes to his feet, then turns away from Charlie to fix his pants.

When he pulls his shirts back down, he swallows at the sight of the wound in his belly. It's a small, clean part in the skin above the vee of his groin, winking like a little red mouth.

Could've been worse. It doesn't even hurt much.

* * *

Back at his motel, hours later, Sam digs the dart out, flushes the wound with holy water, and gives himself a couple of butterfly closures. He drops what the lili left behind in him into a Dixie cup to burn later.

There will be side-effects. Consequences. Everybody knows and cracks jokes about them. Sam's focus in the lead-up to this was on the more acute and lethal effects of the curse, though, so he has to break out the research again to nail down the particulars.

Breaking a lili's curse is a two-step process. Killing her removes the intense focus, thus breaking the spell of sexual delirium she uses to subdue her victims; then reaching climax with another partner refocuses the curse's energy and disperses it harmlessly, like grounding a current. If the victim fails to do this, says the lore, the curse will prove fatal in a year and a day.

Sam doesn't doubt the fuck or die part. The time line is what he has to confirm. The year-and-a-day formula is so common in folklore that it's often shoehorned into supposedly scientific accounts to fill in an information gap, or just to satisfy an author's aesthetic whims. Then other writers using the first as a source echo the fairytale down the ages. Much of hunting lore is like this. If that 366-day figure is an invention—if he actually has hours or days—he needs to know now.

It doesn't take him too long to find a plausible source for it, though. Multiple texts refer to the case of a Syriac nun infected near Damascus in the eighth century. A Coptic hagiography seems to be the source for all of these. The convent's abbess was able to kill the creature, but the nun refused to break her vows. The abbess tended to her, and she succumbed "after a year and a day, as a hired worker counts the days."

Sam fires off an email to the university that has the hagiography up online requesting a PDF of a supplemental source and makes a note to confirm everything against the Men of Letters' archives, but he relaxes. The information looks solid, and he feels fine. Normal. The same as he did yesterday.

So he's got time. He shouldn't put it off for too long, because he wants this taken care of long before Dean ever catches wind of it having happened at all, but it's nice to know he doesn't have to floor it down to the red light district and take the first prostitute who'll have him. For one thing, Easton, Missouri doesn't have a red light district.

He probably will use a prostitute, though. Hookups aren't beyond him but they're rarely his thing, and besides, he wants this to be as straightforward as possible. Having sex for self-preservation is the definition of transactional. That doesn't bother him in and of itself, but he'd like to be able to be honest about it.

For certain values of honest.

His phone rings the next afternoon, just as he's passing Hiawatha. Sam's relieved. He was just starting to get worried, but for some reason hasn't been able to bring himself to call his brother.

Dean looses a tide of profanity against his ear as soon as the call connects. "Hey yourself," Sam says.

"Next time, you get the one in the place with the highest annual rainfall in North fucking America," says Dean.

"Our national forests are a precious, majestic resource, Dean, be glad to spend time in them."

"What's precious about them? If I wanna roll around in mud, I can do it someplace with cell service and willing women."

Sam laughs even though the joke is lame, feels the grin on his face, feels the wind out of the milky gray sky. The car hums down the highway.

"Anyway, yeah, sucker's torched, but I'm beat. Gonna catch a few hours before I hit the road. Was thinking I'd stop off in Whitefish for those boxes we never got out of the basement, probably be back at the bunker in about three days."

"Cool. I'm on my way back there now, I'll let you know if anything comes in over the wire in the meantime."

"Yeah, I got your text when I finally made it back to civilization." They always call or text when the monster's dead, no matter how late it is. "You good there?"

"Yeah, I'm fine." The words come easily. He is, after all. "See you in a few."

* * *

It takes about five weeks to set it up. He finds a lead on a spell they've been looking for that he knows won't pan but gives him an excuse to be away from Lebanon and in a major city. Once he has an idea where, he takes his time and books someone he likes the look and sound of. Simple and civilized.

Sam used to think people who bought sex were weird, making a hypocritical exception (more or less) for Dean. Since spending time with so many prostitutes while soulless, though, he's realized that's not always true. Granted, at the time when he was hiring a lot of hookers, he didn't _care_ that many of them were interesting and relatable people, but he still remembers them and what he gleaned about their working lives. So on the whole, he feels a lot more at ease with the thought of intimacy with a professional than he does with a random body in a bar.

He chooses someone about his own age. Her professional name is, he has no doubt, not the one she goes by in private life, and that's a load off right there. The copy on her social media is literate and appears to be her own work, and she looks nothing like any woman he's ever slept with.

He opts for a business hotel for the meet and a fed suit dressed down to shirtsleeves. Before she comes over, he puts all of the weapons in the car, which Dean would ream him out for, but after all, Dean's never going to know.

Punctually at 9:30, she texts from the other side of the door. She's petite but androgynous in build, with hard edges to her body he wouldn't have sought out before and a dark complexion. Dark hair, but not black. Nobody fair, nobody blond. Standard American accent. Men were always off the table.

She enters wheeling a little carry-on, in low heels and a dress that wouldn't look out of place in a good restaurant. "Nice to meet you, Sam," she says.

"You, too. Coffee? Tea?"

"Coffee's great, thanks."

She observes him from an armchair while she sips the hotel's high-end instant, assessing unobtrusively. "Travel a lot on business?" she asks. A neutral soft-ball.

"A lot, yeah. Though not quite as much as I used to."

She nods, flips her hair over her shoulder, works one foot out of one pump, and tucks it underneath her. It's a good technique: show yourself getting comfortable, relaxing, and wait for your subject to mirror you. Sam does his best to play along. "So why don't you tell me a little about what you're looking for tonight," she says.

Sam has rehearsed this. "I could use some help relaxing." She nods; he knows it's a common phrasing, which is why he chose it. "Nothing fancy. It's been a while. I might need some help getting started."

These, too, are common phrases. It may give her an incorrect or incomplete impression of the nature of his problem, but that's fine. Telling her, "I got hit with a fuck or die curse and it's hard to muster a lot of passion under those circumstances" is not exactly an option.

She puts her coffee cup down in the little saucer: _tink._ "I think we can do that. I appreciate a man who can be upfront. That's always a turn-on for me. Is there anything you don't like?"

Another question to which he has an answer prepared. "Nothing kinky. Nothing against it, just not what I'm looking for right now." She's staying on her side of the coffee table for the whole of this part of the conversation. "I'd like to make you feel good, but please don't feel the need to fake anything. Like, if it's just kind of nice, no need to act like it's anything more than that, you know? Obviously if something's not working for you, just say."

She nods one more time, kicks off her other shoe, stands, and stretches. "You look like you're pretty stressed," she says. "Sounds like you've been working too much. I think you're right; you need some help relaxing." She makes her way around the coffee table, approaching slowly enough to monitor his reactions. He keeps his hands by his sides and looks up at her. "How about a massage?"

A twinge in his gut. _No_ is on the tip of his tongue. But if he can't handle a massage, he certainly won't be able to do what he needs to, so he says, "That sounds great."

Evidently she's judged his body language non-threatening enough to proceed, because she sinks down on the couch next to him. She slides one hand across the back of his shoulders, kneading slowly. "How about we get you out of this shirt, then?" she asks.

He exhales. "Sure."

He works on his cuffs; she starts on the front buttons, moving slowly enough that he could stop her if he wanted. Of course, he could stop her if he wanted no matter what. She flips her hair back over her shoulder when it falls forward, and he can smell the products she uses in the breeze it raises. He leans forward to let her brush the shirt off his shoulders.

Her lips quirk at the undershirt beneath. "So many layers." She scratches her nails lightly over the jersey between his pecs and he shivers. The web of scarring from his right bicep to the elbow and the gauze taped high on his left shoulder don't go unnoticed, but she hides her reaction to them well.

It's nice. She's attractive and confident. She knows what she's doing and she's undemanding. This will be good for him, probably.

She stands and pulls him to his feet before she deals with the undershirt; he lets her strip it off of him, but then when she pulls on his hands—backwards, toward the bed—he finds himself planting his feet and her suggestive tug ends in an awkward yank.

"Uh—what about right here, maybe?" he says, stupidly.

She's a professional, so she barely pauses before she says, "Sure," and steps back into his space.

She seats him back on the couch in the indentation he just departed. Standing in front of him, she reaches behind herself, pauses deliberately, and turns. "Help me with this?" she says, lifting her hair away from the dress's zipper.

He doesn't even have to stand up to do it. She's almost as short as Ruby was. She looks totally different, though. Lighter hair, darker skin. Harder body, squarer jaw, stronger brows, thinner mouth. Impossible to mix the two up.

She turns back to him and holds eye contact as she lets the unzipped dress slip down her shoulders, then down her hips, then to the floor. This is also a good strategy on her part: be more undressed than he is. Though he's never had occasion to deploy it so literally, he recognizes it from a thousand interviews with edgy witnesses. He respects her professionalism.

She slides one knee back onto the couch and one hand over his pectorals, murmuring about his body and its strength but, per his request, not playing it up too much. Her lingerie is high-end, classic. Sam lets out another breath and flexes his hands on his thighs. It's fine. He should touch her. That'll help. He doesn't.

She starts to try to turn him toward the couch arm—so she'll have access to his back—but backs off when he doesn't move under the pressure. Instead she goes back to running her palms over his chest and lightly dragging her nails over the skin after. She's careful to avoid the gauze on his shoulder. What's under it throbs regardless.

A water heater goes on somewhere upstairs from them. The escort scoots closer till she's hip-to-hip with him. She tucks her hair behind his ear with lacquered nails and he does not shudder. Deep, even, regular breaths. Her fingers slide under and around to cup his jaw and turn his face toward her. She studies him. For a moment, he's afraid she's going to kiss him—a little afraid, a little bit wishing she would—but then she shifts nearer to him, slides both hands down to either side of his neck, and begins to work the muscles of his trapezius. "How's that feel?" she murmurs.

He smiles at her and makes it as warm as he can. "You're good with your hands," he says.

She smirks at him. "As a matter of fact, I am." She works at hard, twin knots on either side of his spine. "Would you like to find out exactly how good?"

The procedure to defuse the lili's curse is not overly specific. It requires another person, and an orgasm. Sam hadn't been planning on penetrating her, but he hadn't thought in too much detail beyond that. A hand job does seem like the shortest distance between two points.

"Yes, please." He manages to make it sound a little breathless.

"You look like you're good with your hands, too." She purrs it in his ear. "Show me?"

He puts them on her hips and rubs his thumbs over her obliques. She feels like she does a hell of a lot of pilates.

 _Don't just leave them there,_ he shouts at himself. He can't sit here holding the sex worker he hired like he's a seventh-grader tottering his way through his first slow dance. This all has a purpose, and the sooner he achieves it the sooner they can both get on with their lives. No. Don't think like that. Yes, there's a larger objective here, but he doesn't have to be inhuman about it. The best thing would be to relax into this, lose himself in it. That's what'll get the job done, anyway. That's what real people do. He forces his hands up to underneath her shoulder blades.

She gets up, unhooks her bra, and lets it fall. Her breasts are small and flat, a sharp departure from any other partner he can remember. Slowly, she sinks down to the carpet.

His throat goes tight when she bends to work off his shoes. Something about the sight of her on her knees, at his feet, makes his stomach turn. He breathes through it.

"Relax," she murmurs. "Let me make you feel good."

Holding his gaze, she walks forward on her knees until she's between his legs. They aren't spread wide enough to admit her, but he lets her bump her way inside them. In, out. Deep, even breaths. His throat is very tight. She reaches out, unbuckles his belt, and unzips his fly.

He's only at half-mast, but she seems unperturbed. More massage, this time on his thighs through his slacks, and he wills himself to focus on that feeling, just on the feeling, to register the physical sensation for what it is and block out everything else. She rises and straddles him.

Touching her. He should be touching her. His libido will work better if it's reciprocal, and that is the entire point of this. Her ass is tight and her thighs are sleek and her breasts are right in front of his face. He puts his hands on her arms.

They're slender. His hands are too big on them; the disproportion of their physical power is too obvious. He puts his hands on her knees. She's wearing thigh-high stockings, sheer with black lace borders. The lace feels like plastic under his fingers.

She's mouthing at his shoulders and his chest. She's dragging the nails of one hand up his side, squeezing his hips with her knees, his thighs with her thighs, and her other hand is traveling down, and down, and his vision is a tight black tunnel.

Her hand stops when his breathing does. Sam shuts his eyes and swallows. After a moment, he circles her wrist carefully with his fingers, and she retracts it immediately.

He manages to open his eyes and smile at her, though it feels crooked on his face. She looks back, measured, and unstraddles him to settle on the cushion a couple feet distant. There she waits.

"Sorry," he says eventually.

She just watches him. Her gaze holds no judgment, which might be sincere or might be professionalism. "It's no problem," she says. She bends over, snags her bra, and puts it back on, but he has the sense that she's doing it for him and not for her. She gives him a little more space and, again, waits.

She clearly understands what's happening. Sam should get her to tell him, probably.

He exhales. He's not shaking, or not much, and the narrow black tunnel around his vision has dilated almost back to normal, but the tightness in his chest and his jaw and his throat is still there. He can't seem to make it let up. The thought of saying, _This has never happened to me before_ has him on the verge of giggling, but it is actually true.

"We have time," the woman says. "Do you want to do something else for a while and try again later?"

After a minute, Sam shakes his head. "No. Thanks."

"Okay."

His pulse is still fast and jittery in his neck. He makes himself breathe in and out through his nose and feels a new and unusual kind of shame.

For the last few weeks, he's told himself a lot of things. That it would be easier with a professional, that it would be easier in surroundings as unlike the ones he ordinarily inhabits as possible, that it would be, in fact, no big deal. Now, sitting here with his fly open and a call girl sitting next to him with a throw pillow in her lap, he's forced to admit that this tightness in his chest isn't new. It's been there the whole time, since the moment he hatched the plan. Meaning he really should have seen this coming.

When he zips up his fly and shrugs his shirt back on, she gets up and starts dressing, as well. He smiles at her again and it comes a little easier. "Thanks for your time."

She re-settles onto the chair opposite the sofa, shoes in hand. For a second, with a sinking feeling but also a kick of something humiliatingly like hope, he thinks she's about to play therapist. But all she says is, "It's still your time until midnight. Want me to stay? We could order some Hulu, or something."

"That's all right. Here, let me get you the rest of your fee."

She accepts the money without ceremony, gives him her card, and invites him to call her if he's ever interested in a future appointment. Then she goes. Sam shuts the door, bolts it, strips off the dress clothes, and showers. He shoves the slacks and shirt somewhere out of sight and covers himself in normal clothing.

This hotel caters to business travelers. The room is furnished in earth-tone neutrals, all grays and taupes and slates. The upholstery on the modern furniture is tight. The throw pillows are hard, perfect cylinders. The bedding is high thread-count with an ornamental runner at the foot that has to be taken off and put somewhere before sleep. Sam contemplates throwing what few possessions aren't currently in his duffel back into it and ditching out in favor of a Motel 6.

He doesn't, of course. This was an expensive trip, and it's already been a waste. He doesn't give in to the urge to just get back on the road, either; it's a long enough drive that he's going to have to sleep somewhere, and it might as well be here. He does consider going out and getting blinding drunk, but that's always been more of a chore than a comfort and although part of him feels like that's what he should do—because that's what people do—he doesn't want to.

Besides, he shouldn't. Resolving his situation is, apparently, not going to be as simple as he believed. He needs to think about why.

* * *

He spends the drive back to Lebanon failing to think about it. It doesn't really mean anything, anyway. So he wasn't up for it last night. Okay, fine. He's still got ten and a half months to handle it. They've made way, way tighter deadlines with problems that were a whole lot hairier.

The Impala's in the garage when he gets home. Sam rests a hand on her hood and feels that her engine's warm. Dean just got back, himself.

Sam calls out as he enters the map room, and Dean appears from the corridor with a beer bottle in one hand and a laden plate in the other, saluting Sam with his chin. "Hey. So it was a bust in Minneapolis?" He hooks an ankle around the leg of a chair to drag it out and seats himself at the nearest library table.

Sam drifts over. He lets his duffel down onto the tabletop and stands there. "Uh—yeah. No dice on the manuscript, it's an expurgated copy."

Dean just nods. Sam stated this as the most likely outcome when he announced the venture, but pretended stubborn optimism in order to provoke Dean's pessimism; that pessimism fulfilled, Dean is now done with the topic.

"You eat yet?" Dean asks around a mouthful of sandwich. "I picked up turkey breast."

Once again Sam is overwhelmed by a tightness in his chest and throat, but it's different from the one last night. It's completely different, and it's even more difficult to speak through.

When Dean doesn't get an answer, his eyes cut up to Sam. Sam clears his throat. "Uh, no, I'm good, thanks. Gonna dump my stuff."

If Dean registers his pause as unusual, he lets it go. "Don't bother unpacking," he tells him. "Got something."

At that, Sam takes the opposite seat with a wordless sound of inquiry.

"There's been a series of very unfortunate events in Port Jeff, Long Island. Sounds like a cursed object to me. You wanna?"

Sam's not sure why that sparks such relief when he should be working on his problem. Must be getting a touch of cabin fever, himself. "Definitely, give me ten."

* * *

It's not a cursed object, it's Sabrina the literal Teenaged Witch, and they both get a reminder that malice is not solely the province of adults. Creativity, meanwhile, tends to favor the young. Their substantial edge in knowledge and experience means they make it out in one piece, but by the time all the rabbit fur settles, they're both ready for a distraction.

And Sam has a job to finish.

The bar is a local watering hole that plays up its historic stature to appeal to tourists: plaque beside the door saying when it was built and by whom, old-timey pressed tin ceiling that was probably installed in the last decade. But the food is good, and the drinks are all right, and it's far enough into the season that looking around at the patrons, Sam can see options.

One in particular catches his eye: a brunette at a table by the window whose friend is already chatting with an unattached man in the next seat. She and Sam make eye contact briefly; she quirks her lips at her friend, Sam laughs silently, and then he tucks his hair behind his ear and turns back to his beer. He sneaks a look back at her and makes sure she sees him do it. Then back to his beer, blushing.

Dean misses this exchange because he's down the bar promising a petite blonde a darts lesson, but he's right on the next stool the next time Sam lets the woman see him look over at her. Her friend is long gone. Looking right at him, she leans back in her chair, and recrosses her legs slowly. They're very nice legs.

"Got a live one there, little brother."

"I've given up on getting you to update your music, but could you think about updating your lines?"

"What's with the poop-face? Live a little, Sammy," Dean goads him.

Of course he does. Sam's been acting extra-uptight, made Dean cajole him into coming here at all because he knew Dean would take it as a personal challenge. Now that Dean has, Sam can gradually give in.

Sam sighs, finishes his beer, and signals for another one, ignoring the woman by the window. "You happy?"

Dean rolls his eyes. "No, asshat. Look, she's hot, right? And she looks like fun. _Your_ type of fun, even, not just mine. C'mon, you're gonna give the girl a complex."

Dean's not wrong. She's exactly Sam's type. He already tried shopping for someone who wouldn't remind him of anyone he's ever fucked or been fucked by, and it backfired, so he might as well try working with his libido instead of against it.

Sam gives his brother a pissy look. "So where's your kill of the night?"

"Ask not the ways of the master, Sammy."

Sam's turn to roll his eyes. The scene is so well rehearsed. Even the alternate ending Sam's about to try on has precedent.

He turns about a quarter of the way around on the bar stool and looks the woman up and down. She pauses, grins, and returns the favor. That makes him smile, genuinely.

Dean slaps him on the shoulder. "Go get 'em, Tiger."

Her name is Natalie. Sam buys her a drink. They talk; Sam listens intently, hoping that if he can pour all his focus into her explanation of how boring it is to be a CPA, it'll keep his mind off the knot in his stomach.

But he has an objective, and so does she. It's less than an hour of their heads drawing closer and closer above the table, their knees closer and closer below it, before she wraps a foot wriggled free of its shoe around his ankle and leans in while maintaining eye contact. "Had enough of the shitty beer in this place?" Natalie asks.

Over her shoulder, Sam can see Dean watching from his bar stool like always. A little warmth flares in his stomach, like always.

He leans in. "Maybe," he says. "Have a better idea?"

She smiles like that line's as bad as she was expecting. "Several." Her gaze rakes him again. "Scratch that, just one."

"Yours or mine?"

She smiles more widely, stands, sticks out her hand, and wiggles her fingers.

Even better.

He doesn't see Dean on their way back to the bathroom.

Sam's been paying attention, and he feels like Natalie's been giving off enough of the same signals as the girls he used to go for that he knows more or less what she expects of him. The moment they lock the door after them, she turns and kisses him. He hoists her up with two hands under her ass. Yes—she likes that. The hitch in her breath, the renewed ferocity of her kissing, and her legs locking around his waist all confirm it. The twinge in his shoulder barely registers anymore.

They're in the ladies'. There's a couch in here, a tufted thing probably sourced from a flea market, but Sam doesn't bother; he swings Natalie around and props her against the wall and she groans and it's good. It's good to do something, be something, that he hasn't done or been in a long time. Natalie smells nice when she tilts her head to nibble at his neck and his dick is hard and warm between her thighs. It's good to remember that he knows how to do this. That he is, when he wants to be, outstanding at this.

When he gets his hand into Natalie's panties, her gasp tells him she agrees.

This is better than the call girl. This is going to work. Her cunt is wet and hot and silky under his fingers, and every noise she makes goes right to his cock. He lets loose and she just hangs on for all she's worth, arms around his neck and legs gripping his hips. The back buckle of one of her slingbacks digs into his ass, and she quivers as he works three fingers up into her, lets gravity make her feel the stretch, then he swirls his thumb around her clit once, twice, three, four times and she's arching up off the wall and crying out, and his fingers are sticky-slick.

He works her through it and past it until she's shuddering with overstimulation, at which point she unwraps her legs from his waist one at a time, _click-clack_ of her heels rejoining the floor. She grins up at him, breathless, hair askew and eyes the more wicked for it. They're a nice shade of green.

Then she touches him.

Sam's still fully clothed. Her hand makes contact over his jeans, the pressure of her small fingers distinct through the denim, and he shuts down like someone threw a switch at the main. His erection doesn't flag, or at least not immediately. Nor does he dissociate out of the room, no sudden floating or remoteness to this scene, but he feels her hand on his penis and his mind clamps down on _no_.

He doesn't register grabbing her until her cry of pain. He lets go quickly, face aflame.

Natalie glares, rubbing her wrist. "What's wrong with you?"

"S-sorry," he stammers.

He must look it, because her glare softens, malleable in her afterglow. She steps into his space again, this time pressing herself all along his front, and her palm all along his crotch, and he freezes, and there's no room in his mind for anything past _no_ and this time his erection is flagging.

She's insulted. He can watch that play out on her face, though he can't seem to do or say anything about it. She takes her hand away. "Guess that's what I get for going for somebody older," she says. "FYI, if you think I've got the plague, maybe you shouldn't have shoved your fingers up my vag." She steps back and yanks down the hem of her skirt. Sam's flat against the wall, too numbed by the futility of anything he might say to bother saying it; she pointedly washes her hands at the sink and dries them before heading for the door.

"Don't start what you can't finish," she calls over her shoulder as she leaves.

Sam feels sick. Washing her fluids from his hands doesn't improve the feeling. He would very much like to lock himself in here to pull his shit together or possibly to do the opposite of that, but this is the women's bathroom, so he can't. Instead, he exits into the cramped vestibule between the bar's pool room and the restrooms, where a woman who's clearly been waiting grimaces at him as he emerges. He keeps his head down.

He's so preoccupied with moving through the crowd as inefficiently as possible to delay the moment he has to deal with Dean's jokes that he's almost to the bar before he realizes that his brother's not even there. Sam turns in a circle, scanning the room. Jukebox, dart board, booths, tables, pool area: no Dean.

Instinctive panic has Sam banging out the front door before it occurs to him to check his phone. When he thumbs the screen on, there's a text waiting for him on the lock screen: _headed back 2 motel wont wait up have fun._ Slowly, Sam pockets the phone, staring out at Port Jefferson. He can hear the churn of the ferry, and the early summer heat raises the smell of harborwater thick in the air, trafficked and fouled with pollutants. He wasn't in the bathroom that long. If he tried, he could probably catch up to Dean. But then it would be obvious that he wasn't in the bathroom that long.

He wanders down to the water and the short strip of boardwalk before he turns inland to make his way back to the motel. It's not a long walk, half an hour tops, and it wasn't really late when he left the bar, but when he gets back to the room, Dean's already gone to bed.

Dean's not asleep, of course. Sam can hear that in his breathing as he undresses in the motel semi-dark. He finishes his ablutions and climbs into his own bed without turning on the light.

Minutes tick by, audible courtesy of the wall clock showing twelve different Long Island shore birds. Sheets rustle when Dean reaches up to scratch his nose. Sam stares at the ceiling.

"That was fast," Dean says.

Sam's mind is empty of rejoinders. "Yep," he says eventually.

"Have a good time?"

Sam considers this. The unfortunate ending does not constitute, technically, the whole of the encounter. "Yep," he says again.

He kind of expects that to earn him a snarky comment or at least a snort from Dean, but there's just quiet.

Sam tries not to think about the girl, about the smell or feel of her or any of the specifics, and it's surprisingly easy. Even her reaction, humiliating as it was at the time, seems inconsequential now. It's the rest of the situation he doesn't know what to do with.

It's stupid. It really doesn't make any sense. He hooks up. Not frequently, and not recently, but he does it, and he enjoys it. He can't see anything that should be different about this time.

"I struck out with Natalie," Sam almost says. "I got her off, but then she went to return the favor and I couldn't do it, Dean," he nearly tells his brother. "I needed it, and I had it all sewn up, but I freaked out instead," is right on the tip of his tongue, pushing against his lips. "I don't know why. Except it kind of feels like I do."

But of course, he doesn't say any of that.

More rustling. That's Dean bending his leg under the covers, bringing one knee up, one socked foot flat on the mattress. Sam's looking at the ceiling, but good peripheral vision is a trait hunting naturally selects for. It's not surprising Dean's still awake. It is surprising he went to bed this early in the first place. It's very surprising he isn't teasing Sam about his sex life. Sam isn't sure why he's in bed himself, for that matter. He's got no chance at all of sleeping. He's confused and on edge and yet somehow vaguely horny still, body primed for sex it never got. That it didn't want it doesn't seem to matter.

"Give you twenty questions," Dean says when they're both still awake forty-one minutes later.

Sam takes him up on it readily. "Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

"Animal with a side of none of the above."

Sam flexes his foot so his toes pop like Rice Krispies. Life's simple pleasures. "Does it have consciousness?"

Dean considers. "Kinda. Sorta. Maybe. Dunno."

This is a valid answer in their rules. "Does it _require_ consciousness?"

"Yes."

Huh. That was prompt. Sam has an odd feeling, like Dean has prepared this one, like it's not spur-of-the-moment at all, but Sam has no idea what the deal is if so.

"Is it a kind of monster?"

Slight pause. "Pass."

"Two left." They get three passes per game, this was negotiated way back in elementary school. Every pass from the answerer entitles the asker to an _or_ question.

"Does it live with people or in the wild?"

"Both at the same time." Again very prompt.

Lives with people; lives in the wild. Won't say if it's a kind of monster. At the very least, then, monsters probably eat at the same table.

"So in other words, it lives in the same places we do."

Dean's indrawn breath sounds like a match scratch. "Yeah, Sam."

Sam's mind returns to Dean watching him on the barstool, nursing a beer, expression carefully neutral. He was alone when Sam saw that. Had anyone tried to fill Sam's seat after he'd gone to sit with Natalie? Someone must have. Someone always does. But Dean was alone. So Dean must have turned that person down. And now Dean's here, in a darkened room with Sam, neither of them having scored, evidently gnawing on something.

"Do we hunt it?"

"I said 'pass'—"

"Not asking if it's a monster; asking if we treat it like one."

Quiet long enough for Dean to run a scenario or two. "Sometimes."

"Can it die?"

"You'd know better than I would."

Bullshit fucking answer. Sam's not counting it.

"Do I agree with you that it doesn't exist?"

Sam's not sure why he asks that. Neither of them has before, that he can think of. Still, the length of Dean's answering silence is difficult to understand. It was just a jab; Dean's supposed to parry it. But there's nothing, no snarky comeback. For a minute, he thinks Dean's actually going to answer the question seriously, and he can't decide whether the sudden tension is all in his head or not.

But instead Dean just says, "Pass."

That wrong-foots Sam. "What the hell, you can't pass twice."

"Last I checked I can pass three times, so, yeah, I kind of can?"

Sure, but not, like, one right after the other. Dean's in a weird mood. A weirder mood than Sam, and that's saying something.

Five minutes ago this sounded like a great distraction from his predicament. Now, abruptly, Sam finds it so intensely annoying that he doesn't even care what's eating Dean. "I give up, what is it?"

There's another long pause, though not quite as long as the one before Dean's last pass. "A motel washrag that won't give you crabs."

That answer was so obviously made up in the seven seconds preceding it that Sam would be embarrassed for his brother if he weren't too incredulous. "You changed it," he says.

"I did not," says Dean, confirming that he did.

"You did, too!" Sam cannot believe what just took place. "You can't change the thing you're thinking of, that's, like, the most basic rule."

"I didn't change it," Dean insists, doubling down on the lie.

Sam is outraged. He is surprised at himself with how pissy he is about this. "Whatever," he says, and turns over on his side.

His annoyance is short-lived. He can see the alarm clock reflected in the glass of the picture hung on the wall he's facing; it wasn't late before, but it kind of is now. He rubs at his nose, and—suddenly he can't not remember that he didn't just strike out with a girl tonight. That wasn't all it was, and when they leave this town tomorrow, Sam won't be leaving that problem behind. And he remembers her hand on him, and his hand in her, and he swallows down nausea but he also _wants._ He's not frustrated enough to be sporting wood, but there's a nagging ache at the base of his cock. There's nothing pleasant about it. He wishes it would just stop.

Sam can feel Dean on the opposite bed. They used to play a game in the back seat of the car when they were kids: one of them would point his finger right between the other's eyes and slowly bring it closer. The objective, to the extent that there was one, was to keep the finger in view and maybe also to last as long as they could without slapping it out of their faces. An incredibly stupid game. Sam always used to get this buzzing sensation between his eyes as the finger got closer. This feels like that.

Dean clears his throat in the next bed. "I swear sometimes it's easier to sleep in the car. You know?"

"Yeah," says Sam. "I think I do."

There's a faint creaking as Dean resettles on the mattress, and this time he does sound like he's preparing to sleep, or at least to really try. "Goodnight, Sammy."

Sam turns, as quietly as he can, so he's on his side facing the other bed.

"See you in the morning, Dean."

* * *

"I'm going into town," Dean says a couple weeks later. "Got anything to add to the Aldi's list?"

Sam glances up from his laptop and shakes his head.

"What about Walmart, I got TP, Windex, and rock salt, can you think of anything else?"

"Uh, yeah, we're almost out of duct tape."

"Shit, yeah, that's right." Dean taps it into his phone, which is where they share the shopping lists with each other. "All right, back in a bit." Dean nods at the computer as he clomps down into the map room. "And if you won't get out of the house, at least take a break, yeah? Do something healthy. Take a shower, run some laps, watch a porno."

Sam rolls his eyes, like he's supposed to, and Dean's footsteps ring up the metal stairs to the outside world.

He stands and stretches. Vertebrae pop all along his back, with a familiar answering throb in his shoulder, and stares blearily at the laptop. He sniffs himself. Dean's right about the shower.

The Men of Letters' washroom is institutional and shared, eight showerheads clustered into a room undivided by cubicles. Which, frankly, is dumb, considering how much space there is in here, but the bunker is full of touches like that: things where it's like they went out of their way to make it more uncomfortable than necessary, just to convince themselves they had the discipline of a military organization.

Sam's not wild about it. It doesn't bother him to shower in front of Dean, they've done that since they were kids, but when all the other hunters were in here—well. That was another story. There've been a couple of times he was showering and Cas wandered in, before the angel eventually seemed to get a clue or, more probably, was hand-delivered one by Dean. By dint of cautious timing and speed, Sam managed never to repeat the experience with Jack, so that's something.

He's got it all to himself now, though. He reminds himself of that. He still feels the intrusion of too much space all around, but as he works the shampoo through his hair, he reminds himself that he is alone in here, and he can take up as much space as he likes, and there is no one to watch, and if he enjoys the warmth of the water pelting his skin, there is no one to care. There is no one to care if he denies himself, either. There hasn't been for quite some time. Chuck has officially changed the channel.

And the water soothes the ache in his shoulder. For a long time, he thought the hole the Equalizer punched in him would never close—that it would remain open and festering until whatever turned his lights out for good, like some kind of Fisher King wound. Only when Chuck and Amara finally jumped universes did it drain and begin at last to heal. It's been scarred over for months, but the internal damage is still there. It doesn't hold him back much, didn't even when it was still fresh, but he has to do exercises every day to keep range of motion and though he mostly doesn't notice anymore, it always hurts.

It's a good thing, in some ways. It's a reminder: the audience went home. Sam thinks maybe this is why he's able to believe that Chuck is truly gone and Dean can't, quite.

He stays in the shower for a lot longer than he normally would, under water that's a lot hotter than he usually turns it, so when he finally does shut it off, he experiences the pleasant wooziness-cum-languor of blood drawn all the way out to the surface starting its journey back to status quo. By the time he makes it back to his room, he's still feeling it. Sam unwraps the towel from around his waist, watches it land on his neatly made bed, and decides, _Yeah, actually._

He turns down the covers and gets under the sheets. It always gets a little too warm this way, but he doesn't care for the sensation of air all over his skin here any more than in the shower. Even a sheet alone is really too exposed to keep a mood; he needs the sheet and blanket both. Still: it feels a little delicious to be naked underneath. Luxurious. Sam exhales, stretches out, and puts a hand on his stomach.

It's been a while. It's not that he intentionally refrains—he's still not a monk, whatever Dean thinks—it's just that it doesn't really rate anymore. There was always so much going on for so long that he sort of fell out of the habit. But he's not thinking about that. The point is to switch thinking right off and just feel. He was good at that, once.

Sam skates his fingers over the thin, delicate skin of his belly, the strip just above the thatch of hair where his dick is curled up soft. He can feel the muscle under there. He avoids the scar that interrupts that skin near his left hip, closes his eyes, and feels how his light, indirect touch starts to waken interest in the part of him that's supposed to be more sensitive.

He keeps up this way for a while: trailing fingertips over his sides, through the dips between his ribs, along that flat and vulnerable vee above his cock, over the skin of his inner thighs. He's mostly hard, now, but he's still not ready to take himself in hand. He needs something more to get to that point. Mere sensation isn't enough; he needs a picture it all fits into, something that will make it feel like more than him alone in his bed. He needs a fantasy.

Like any guy, he's got a list. He considers a few generic ones featuring women as complete images—one on her knees, one on his lap, one against a wall, one with her thighs tight around his ears—but discards them quickly. He digs down to a few bulletproof carnal notions of the sort that are always inchoate and never feature faces, the ones that are simply parts and positions—giving, receiving, pinning down or being pinned—but can't get traction with them today. None of them achieve more than touch alone does, which is to say, not a lot.

Sam shuts his eyes, breathes in for the count of five, holds for three, breathes out for seven. He reminds himself: there is no one to know or care what goes on in his own head. He's got a sore, cratered scar in his left shoulder that proves it.

He lets himself.

Images and impressions of hands around his throat, of blows rocking his body, of knives in his insides pulling out blood and tissue and pain, and—his gut clenches, his cock jumps—wreaking _damage,_ real damage, the kind that can't be put to rights by anyone. Blades ripping through him in the knowledge that it can't be undone and not caring. No—caring a lot, actually. It's the point. It's the entire point. Being ruined on purpose.

 _There's_ the passion.

The images are pale metaphors for things that have no real analogue on this side of the soil, but they're enough to get him going. His cock is hard in his hand now, and his balls feel like he hasn't gotten off in months (which he hasn't, but doesn't often notice). If he also feels a little sick, it's a small price to pay, because suddenly his body is alive. But in truth, he doesn't even feel all that bad about whatever this is in the first place. It's been a long time since he has. There's no point. Some wires got crossed somewhere downstairs, and now it's all just sex.

Once they've gotten him going, though, Sam locks those pictures away again. He can live with them being a part of him, but he doesn't want to come from them, and he doesn't want to spend more time indulging them than he needs. Because that's the key thing: so long as it's his need steering this, it's all right. But he refuses to rent the Devil space in his head for free. His freedom is made up of acts of defiance as small as these.

Now he has to decide what to think about instead. Maybe it's time for a bigger kind of defiance.

His hand runs smoothly up and down his shaft. It feels nice—great. His fist is warm and as tight as he wants to make it. But it's still just sensation and sensation alone doesn't do it for Sam, so he closes his eyes and imagines Dean.

Dean standing before him. Dean's fingers cradling his face—as they've done so many times before—the same—but not—slipping back into his hair—tugging him down—Dean's mouth on his—

The thoughts are as inchoate as the ones that come out of Hell or his animal brain, but for a different reason. Fantasies take practice. They want time and mental rehearsal to ripen from the seed of some random angle or position or hardwired kink the brain finds hot into a fully fledged story, even one that's told in bodies. Sam has never allowed himself to practice this. It's not because he feels much guilt over it—no point this far out. There are reasons he doesn't beat off thinking about his brother as a general rule, but they're not the reasons most people wouldn't and they haven't been for years, if ever they were. The reasons are compelling enough, though, that he hardly ever does it. Today is not the first time, but it's rare, terribly rare, could count the times on his fingers and have some left over, so although he tries to brace for it, he's still taken off-guard by the force of his own want.

Longing drives through him like a spike, nails him to a wall and leaves him hanging. _Dean._ There are no rehearsed stories, so there are only fragmentary urges: _get him out of those layers get him on this bed get at the smell of him._ And pictures, to be sure: his marks on Dean's skin, Dean's hands on his hips, Dean's cock riding alongside his, Dean's head bent down in disbelief at the sight, panting, noises coming out of him. Dean's legs splayed wide while Dean's stomach jumps with arousal on the edge of panic and Dean _lets_ him get up in there. Dean's cock splitting him open, way too much and beautifully painful. Dean's face when he's holding Sam's in both of those hands.

_please, please, please._

Only the thoughts, and the images, and a feeling Sam has never known what to do with that is so much better and so much worse, he knows, than lust. Something that makes his groin and his chest ache sweetly, and his throat go tight, and makes him picture Dean at the moment of climax with his face broken open in something very like pain.

_please, please, please, please—_

Come streaks Sam's front, and his eyes are clenched shut as he comes down, breaths ragged. He shudders, full-body, not at the come or even the state of his sheets but from the sheer intensity of the orgasm and the wake of its retreat. It's a long time before his pulse and breathing return to normal. He swallows.

All he can really think, lying there, is, _Well._

After a few minutes, he peels off the covers. He swings his legs over the side of the bed. He starts to stand up.

Suddenly his pulse pounds, his vision rolls to black, there's a sensation of free-fall, and when the world filters back in, he's sitting on the mattress again with a roaring retreating in his ears. An intense headrush, basically. A strange, momentary weakness. Nothing. He's felt much the same just from too many all-nighters and too few calories, except that when it's over, he feels different somehow, like a small margin of him has washed away, and he knows.

This is the first effect of the curse.

Sam swallows again, staring at the floor between his knees with his stomach roiling. Maybe it's because he just got off. Maybe all the other vics died because masturbation is such a natural human function and they just never made the connection. Maybe all he has to is not rub one out and he'll be fine indefinitely.

But that's crap, and he knows it. Whether the timing of this episode is significant or not, this curse is coming for him—same as it has for every other victim down through history. _Purity_ won't save him. It didn't save an eighth century nun.

He deals with the sheets, dogged by unease. And that makes no sense. He should be feeling hopeful right now. Part of him was starting to wonder if he was even capable of reaching climax anymore, of doing what needs to be done; he just proved that he is. This is good. This should be good.

Abruptly Sam is anxious to see his brother. Or perhaps he's anxious and wants Dean, period; both are common enough states that it's easy to confuse the two. As he's leaving his room, he hears the bunker door swinging open and makes for it like it's a homing beacon.

"Hey," says Dean, coming down the stairs with his arms laden with shopping bags. Sam feels instant relief at the sight of him. "Get the rest out of the backseat, will you?"

It could be any of a hundred days. The only thing remarkable about it is that it's more boringly ordinary than they ever thought they'd get. Nevertheless, standing beside Dean in the kitchen, Sam finds himself pulled into a deep well of peace, shelving Campbell's soup.

The feeling is so far past his understanding that he might marvel at it, were it not so total. His earlier disquiet is gone, swept gently away like leaves off a stoop. He feels like something inside him is waiting for something, but it's a quiet sense, not an urgent one. It's waiting the way the ground in spring waits.

He has the realization as he's emptying the last bag. He and Dean are making conversation about the price of produce, Dean complaining about how they're paying more in the middle of farmland than they would in a city, Sam saying something about supply chains and food deserts. At the same time, his mind is tracing the cardioid shape on the dart he dug out of his stomach, and all at once he understands why he's still under the lili's curse despite two attempts to cure it and Winchester DNA.

It isn't that he's not capable of doing this. It's that he's not willing to.

Given its magnitude, there should probably be some outward manifestation of this epiphany, but he doesn't even stop putting away the groceries. Sam just thinks, _No,_ and the moment he does, he feels very light inside.

"I was thinking," says Dean, and even his brother's voice sounds clearer, like Sam's never really heard it before. "We should go up to Sioux Falls, look in on Jody."

And, "Yeah, that sounds good, we can refresh the wards on Bobby's old place." Sam shelves a box of cornflakes. "Hey, Dean."

"Yeah, Sammy?"

Instinctively Sam wants to share some of this lightness with his brother, who needs it more than anybody, but he's having an epiphany, not delirious. So he just says, "Maybe get the unfrosted next time?"

"What do I look like, a heathen?"

Sam finishes putting away the contents of his bag, turns, and sees Dean standing with a stray can of cream of tomato in one hand and a faint frown on his face. Not really a troubled frown, just a faintly perplexed one. "What's that look about?" he asks Sam.

"Huh?" says Sam, honestly mystified.

Dean inspects him for a few seconds before he shrugs and slides the soup can home. "Nothing. Never mind. What do you want to do for dinner?"

* * *

Later, and Sam is again lying in his bed, this time staring at the ceiling. Down the hall, he hears Dean open and shut the bathroom door.

Even though he feels light inside, he stays awake for a very long time.

* * *

For the next several days, the decision—the fact that he's made one, is making one every day now—registers for Sam by degrees, settling into his skin. After all the times he didn't have a choice, this time, he does. He's saying no. It is as simple and insane as that.

Sometimes Sam feels almost giddy thinking about it. Other times, it's terrifying, a feeling like being dipped in cold bleach. Sometimes he gets these faint pangs, like something far off coming closer. But mostly he just feels that lightness, an attenuated version of what washed over him in the kitchen.

It's not like this is the first time he's been ready or willing to die. The only thing that makes it remotely special is that it'll be his last. That cold bleach fear won't let him delude himself that the permanence is insignificant, but since that moment of realization in the kitchen, he's known that for him, it is worth it. He knows the price, and he's going to pay it.

That still leaves him with the problem of how to tell Dean, however.

Because he does have to tell Dean. He's not that much of a hypocrite and he wouldn't do that to his brother. Besides, on a selfish level, he can admit to himself that he doesn't want to die alone.

He doesn't want to die at all, frankly. That's not what this is. He is 99.9% sure that he's not being influenced by a death wish. But even if some part of this is him jumping on an easy out, it isn't all it is, and it doesn't erase one letter of all the rest.

He'll look for an alternative, of course. Maybe sex isn't the only way to break the lili's curse; maybe it's just that nobody's seriously looked for another one before because there wasn't much reason to. But that's a maybe. And Dean isn't going to be impressed by a maybe.

Sam doesn't know how to tell him. He doesn't know _when_ to tell him. It's not just a moral or emotional question, either; it's a practical one. Dean cannot be trusted. Not with this.

Sam tries to rehearse the conversation in his head, while they're driving, or he's working out, or he's brushing his teeth. It never fails to put a sinking feeling in his stomach. Parts of the conversation are impossible for Sam to envision ("Hi, Dean, so I'm under this fatal curse with an easy fix, but on the whole, having thought about it, nah"), but Dean calling him a selfish bastard—that part is easy. For some reason, Sam thinks of the time more than fifteen years ago when he got out of the car in the middle of nowhere, and took his bags out of the trunk, and he walked toward Cali while Dean drove to Indiana. He hasn't thought about that night in forever, but now he can taste the air, smell the rain on the pavement, feel the chill on his skin.

There is a side of this that is insane but in no wise simple. Sam thrusts it away from himself, but he feels its weight. It's joined to him.

 _I'll tell him tomorrow,_ he thinks each night. _I'll take a walk in the morning and figure out how to say it. If I lead with working on another solution, he can be reasonable about it for a while. And I'll come up with a plan for if he isn't._

But then in the morning there's an alert blinking from one of his search algorithms, or a message from Donna, or Dean's got a hangover, or Sam's shoulder's so locked up and throbbing he has to nix the walk in favor of extended PT, and one day slips inexorably into the next.

* * *

They drive from Broken Arrow to Indianola because two days ago, Sam said, "Hey, do you remember that burger place on Route 62, the one by the river? Think it's still there?" and suggested maybe a half day riverside on their way back from the hunt they just finished. Dean seems a little surprised, but it's not hard to get him to go along with ideas involving road food or fishing.

Sam keeps having these attacks of nostalgia. He's careful to keep a lid on them. He understands what they are, and having been on the other side a time or three, he knows exactly what they'll look like if he isn't careful. Anyway, he doesn't need to do any of the bucket list shit. They still haven't made it to the Grand Canyon, and he doesn't mind that they probably won't. All he wants is some good days with his brother, and they can have those anywhere.

And it is a good day. Dean's in a weirdly good mood, aggressively so, even, singing snatches of CCR as they pick their way down to the river from the road, Dean with the nightcrawlers, Sam with the beers. The river is smaller than Sam remembers it, but that doesn't seem to bother Dean any. He just calls out, "That one, Sammy! That's our rock!" and points to a broad, flattish boulder that divides the rapids from a promising trout pool.

Dean strikes out first, fishing rod in one hand, styrofoam chest of bait in the other. Sam watches him jump from rock to rock, cursing when he slips even though his shoes are wet already, a sweat Rorschach on his t-shirt where his shoulder blades pressed into the car's backrest. The boulder is clearly a popular spot: beer cans and cigarette butts are lodged in the cracks, and someone's left bent aluminum deck chairs out here, two of which they appropriate. It's a clear, hot day, one of those gems of late summer or early fall when the sun pours out of endless cobalt blue and lights up everything with a brilliance it will hold only once or twice a year. Dean settles into one of the bent-but-serviceable deck chairs, crosses his legs, on which his jeans are rolled up to his knees, at the ankles, pops a longneck with his ring, and turns his face up to the sky.

For several long seconds, Sam can't breathe. It isn't only how beautiful Dean is right then, though he is. It's everything. Everything Dean is, and the fact that Dean is everything.

The feeling overwhelms Sam. It hurts his chest and stops his mouth. It's too big. It's always been too big, so he's always shied away from it. But ever since his decision, he keeps tiptoeing up to the edge of it, because he doesn't want to die without at least trying to feel all of it.

His jaw doesn't seem to want to work, and if Dean asked him something right now Sam would be screwed. Tears prickle at the corners of his eyes, but Dean's facing the river and Sam's got sunglasses on. He rides it out.

They sit for a long time.

Sam's never had much gift for fishing, nor got the enjoyment out of it that Dean does. It's mainly a cover for him to sit here and soak up his brother, whose smiles do more to reach his bones and ease his shoulder than the sun. He listens to the rush of the rapids and the whir of Dean's line and lets his mind empty of everything else.

"We've had a pretty good year, haven't we?"

Sam starts at the sound of Dean's voice. "Uh… yeah, I guess so." God fucking off solved most of the outstanding cosmic problems of which they were aware, and it's hard for any sort of year not to compare favorably after that.

"Productive, I mean. How much evil crap have we killed since New Year's?"

Sam keeps tabs on this stuff, but he'd have to consult his records to come up with an actual number. "I dunno. Ten gigs at least, but there was that one in Texas that didn't pan."

"Yeah, but we did some separately, too."

"True, yeah."

"Where were you while I was working that haunting up in Grosse Point?"

"Uh…" February, that had been—bitterly cold. "Taos. We thought it was a haunting, but when I got there it turned out to be a curse."

"Right, right." Dean fishes for a while. "Nice one, by the way."

"Thanks?" Sam is confused. Dean doesn't talk and fish. Not talking is pretty much the entire point of fishing, to Dean's mind. Sam's the one who always used to get bored and try to skip stones or initiate a game of Twenty Questions or some deep philosophical conversation, and Dean would always shush him like his least favorite flavor of librarian.

"I just mean, we still got it. Right? Look at us. Sixteen some-odd years we been hunting together"—Sam isn't sure whether he's touched or miffed Dean's writing off everything before Jess died in that sentence.—"and we are still going strong. How many hunters can say that? Hell, how many hunters are alive to say that? How many make it this far without something getting them?"

Sam swallows. It's pushing three in the afternoon, the hottest part of the day with the sun bearing down overhead, but he no longer feels its warmth. "Something has gotten us," he points out. "Both of us. Multiple times."

Dean pauses before flicking his line out into a distant pool. "Point. Different story now that Chuck's clocked out, though."

Sam shuts his eyes behind his sunglasses. Dean's absorbed in watching his line, but if he does turn around, Sam should just look like he's relaxing. "Yeah. It is."

Dean clears his throat. Instantly Sam is on high alert. He wondered whether Dean's strange talkativeness was building to something; now he knows it was.

"Something I gotta get off my chest, Sammy."

Sam keeps his voice carefully level. "What's up?"

Dean's wearing sunglasses, too, but his gaze seems to be laser-trained on the bob marking his fishhook. "Okay, so you remember that werewolf in the Pacific Northwest back in spring?"

Sam's hand is rock-steady when he reaches into the cooler for another beer. A lifetime of handling deadly weapons at peak adrenaline rush has been good for that much. "Yeah, I think so."

"When was that exactly, anyway?"

"I dunno," Sam lies. "April or May."

Dean nods. "Right, yeah. April, maybe? Late April?"

"Something like that. I'd have to check back through my phone. Not sure I still have those details, though." Of course he has them, under lock and key. "Why?"

Dean hesitates. "Never mind. Doesn't matter, I guess. Anyway, I— While I was in the woods, for a while I thought I might have been bitten."

It's several seconds before Sam processes this. _"What?"_

Dean rubs at the back of his neck. "The thing hit me and we rolled. It was outside. We rolled over a bear trap as we were going, but he was snapping at me the whole time before I got my shot in. You know what it's like: it happened fast, ten seconds total, maybe. Anyway. By the time I shoved his corpse off of me, I had a gash in me that looked like teeth, and I couldn't be sure if it had come from the werewolf or the trap."

"Why didn't you tell me?" It explodes out of Sam against his will, even as the larger part of him stands back and marvels at his own hypocrisy.

Dean shoots him a look—Sam can just see it, sideways under the sunglasses—before he hunches over his fishing rod. "It was a mistake," he mumbles. "I mean, I checked whether I was infected as soon as I got back to the car, and I wasn't. If I was infected, obviously I would've told you."

"I'd sure as hell hope so!" Wow, is Sam ever going back to Hell. Sixth circle. Dante's got a shiny lead suit all picked out for him.

Dean flinches, and sunglasses or no sunglasses, Sam can read the guilt there, which is—odd. Well, not exactly, Dean and guilt are like truck stops and hep A, but something about the guilt is odd.

"Anyway, it doesn't matter. Forget about it."

Obviously Dean is not infected, since it's been months. The knee-jerk adrenaline is still having its way with Sam, though. "Why bring it up if it doesn't matter?" he demands.

That odd look again. "I— Never mind. Seriously, forget it, I'm sorry."

Sam chooses to believe the werewolf is what he's sorry about. Dean remains contrite for the remainder of their time on the river, to the point of silently giving up the last beer, but Sam realizes that Dean feeling guilty isn't what he wants out of this afternoon. So he makes himself relax, and Dean relaxes in turn, and by the time they're leaving the river behind with the gold of sunset on it, they're easy between themselves again.

Dean's got sunburn on the back of his neck, between his elbows and his shirt sleeves, and over the bridge of his nose where the sunscreen sweated off. Sam feels a surge of such overflowing gratitude that he almost tears up again.

They get a room fifty miles down the highway. It's early to stop driving, but they're both still feeling lazy from all the sun.

Dean tosses his bag on the nearest bed and says, "Let's hit that dive we saw on the way in. We can have a few drinks, get ourselves a little _takeout."_ He waggles his eyebrows at Sam.

Both the expression on Dean's face and the one that just came out of his mouth are so ludicrous that Sam busts out laughing. "Enticing though that offer is, I think I'll pass, but go for it."

Dean pauses. "Come on, Sammy, live a little."

They're the same words he used to get Sam to come out to the bar in Port Jefferson where he met Natalie. Dean's always saying that: _Live a little._ "No, thanks," Sam says again.

"Seriously, Sam. You should come out."

"You're on for dinner, but you're flying solo for the rest of it," Sam says, still smiling a little.

"Why's that?"

Sam's unprepared for the aggression in Dean's tone. "The hell do you mean?" Now his own mood has flipped.

"What's with the purity pledge?" Dean digs in. "It's a natural bodily function. Birds do it, bees do it. What's your problem?"

"Jesus Christ, Dean, you gonna micromanage how often I piss now, too? You don't see me passing judgment on your choices, here, I don't have a problem with it."

"Oh? You got no problem with it? So what happened with that chick in Port Jeff?"

Sam is momentarily speechless. "Nothing happened with her."

Dean snorts and turns away to dig in his duffel. "Yeah, I can tell."

Sam is shaking with anger. If it's not one thing with Dean, it's another. If it's not a life-long guilt-trip for daring to go to college, it's joking-but-not-sneers at everything he puts on the radio. If it's not shoving an angel down his throat, it's tricking him into eating what he's said he doesn't want to eat. If it's not a world of shit for every woman he's ever hooked up with, it's shit for not hooking up at all. "What the hell is it to you?"

Dean glances up. "Nothing, apparently." He grabs the flannel he's been digging for, zips up the bag, and heads for the door.

Oh. Apparently Sam's not even invited out to dinner, now. "Have a nice time," he calls after his brother sarcastically.

"Thanks, I will," Dean calls back over his shoulder, and the door slams after him.

Sam sits on the edge of the bed and fists his hands in his hair. It takes several minutes for him to get his breathing back under control. Then he drops his hands in his lap, stares at them for a moment, snorts, and gets up.

He goes to bed early. There's no reason not to, and he's going to need all the rest he can get to be able to handle Dean calmly in the morning. Which he really does have to do. Time is finite. Sam already regrets the night they've just flushed away; that's however many hours of eating, drinking, and shooting pool in his brother's company that he'll never get back, now.

He's just starting to drift off when the door creaks open. There's the usual song: fumbling as Dean divests himself of jacket and keys without turning on the light, muffled thud and curse as he bumps into the wall untying his shoes. Dean must've had quite a lot, to reach the point of physical impairment. Sam barely wakes up for it. If anything, knowing for certain where Dean is has him sinking deeper and faster than he was before, and by the time Dean comes out of the bathroom, Sam's just about under.

His eyes snap open in the dark when the covers lift at his back.

The mattress jounces, creaks. A body maneuvers itself roughly horizontal behind him. Sam stays very still.

"Dean?" he whispers. "What are you doing?"

No answer. Dean's movements are heavy and uncoordinated. The perfume of whoever his hookup was filters up under the sheets.

Dean wads up the spare pillow and sniffs. Then he turns over, and Sam feels his breath hot on the back of his neck, toothpaste and alcohol both detectable. Sam's mouth is very dry.

He almost asks it again ( _What are you doing?_ ), but he doesn't. Dean is a warm, distinct presence through a thin layer of air. Sam didn't think he could even get this drunk anymore.

Then Dean's arm slides heavy over Sam's stomach and pulls him back, and the layer of air is gone. Sam can feel Dean through cotton now: ribs, hipbones, the firmness of chest and the give of belly. With a cold foot and a bony ankle, Dean scoops one of Sam's legs back to tangle with his own. Clumsy fingers pet briefly over his hair.

"Go t'sleep, Sammy." Dean settles, and his breaths go long and even.

Sam's do not for a very long time.

* * *

In the morning, Sam extracts himself from Dean's arms shortly after dawn, rumples the covers in the opposite bed to make it look slept in, and goes for a run. By the time he's showered, he feels fairly human, and by the time he's brought them both breakfast and coffee, Dean is awake, tottering out of the bathroom, muttering about Jäger and tequila as an ill-advised combo.

Neither of them mention the previous evening. Dean's eyes seem rather clear, though. Perhaps he's playing up the hangover to distract from the extent of his tolerance. Or perhaps it's simply habit. So many things are, between them.

Either way, when Sam offers to drive, Dean lets him, sunglasses firmly on despite cloud cover that moved in during the night. Sam puts the bench seat back a couple inches and Dean doesn't say a word. He just sprawls out in the passenger seat, one leg bent against the door, opposite arm stretched along the back of the seat.

Dean's hand brushes the back of Sam's neck. Sam sucks in a breath, but he keeps driving. What else is there for him to do? Dean doesn't even seem to have noticed.

* * *

They don't talk about that night, but Dean doesn't try to get Sam laid again, either, so that's something. Sam doesn't know what it is—welcome, frustrating, weird or the opposite—but it's something.

They hunt. Chuck fucked off for keeps, but business as usual still means a never-ending shit show on the monster front, and Sam oscillates between considerable frustration with that—he's got half a year left on Earth, and he's spending it getting thrown through walls and burning corpses?—and gratitude that he doesn't want to examine too closely, because it might mean he wouldn't know what else to do with himself.

So they hunt. They drive. They bump around backroads America. And Dean touches Sam.

He ruffles Sam's hair to annoy him; he pats his knee when he gets up from bar stools. He guides him through doors with a hand on his back. He rests a hand between Sam's shoulder blades when he stands, very close, behind Sam to look at whatever Sam's showing him on the laptop. He slings his arm over the back of seats they share.

It drives Sam nuts, because he can't quite work out whether anything's actually changed. Dean has always touched him like this. Dean used to touch him like this all the time. He's a tactile guy, and Sam grew up with so many of those touches that he no more questioned it when he was younger than the air he breathed. But the touches dwindled after Dean went to Hell. Not the ones like Dean's hands running over him to check for injuries, or Dean's fingers holding his face, or Dean's knuckles brushing his hair away from his temple to see if something needs stitches—not the ones born of fear and desperation and anger, or fear and desperation masked as anger. Those never went anywhere. They've waxed and waned over time, with Dean reining himself in tightly after the Mark on his arm, but they never stopped entirely.

All of this flux makes it hard for Sam to tell if this is really new and different. Like, maybe Dean's been doing this for a while, and Sam's only noticing it suddenly. Maybe he imagined Dean ever stopping it at all. Maybe his sense that there's something in these touches that's different from the ones Sam grew up with, the utterly unselfconscious ones that poured out of Dean from before Sam can remember until the day Sam turned twenty-five, is delusion. Maybe he's the only one who's being weird.

Either way, time is passing. Sam has been looking, very quietly, for an alternative solution to his problem, but he hasn't found one yet. He doesn't really expect to. They don't get things like that. They're lucky enough when there's any way out; they don't get third options to ease decisions they don't want to make.

Which means he needs to tell Dean.

He needs to tell Dean _right now._ Literally right now. Enough of this pussyfooting around; he's wasted precious time postponing this trying to come up with a good excuse for why he's postponed it as long as he already has, and it's not like Dean is going to accept an airtight reason any better than no reason and really, how the hell would Sam feel if their positions were reversed?

Dean drops back into the chair next to his at the diner table and nods at the pen Sam's been holding poised over his newspaper for the last five minutes. "Anything?"

"Uh…." Sam struggles to focus on the print. "Got a maybe down in Burlington. Somebody got thrown out a fourth-story window that was supposed to be locked and barred—with 'inhuman force'. Could be a vengeful spirit."

"Can I see?"

Sam holds the paper out; Dean reaches for it. His fingertips trail over Sam's pulse point as he takes the _New England Gazette_ in hand, and Sam's breath stops in his mouth.

Dean scans the article, nods, throws money down on the table. "Worth a look," he says. "Worst case scenario, we can pick up new winter coats."

Sam doesn't roll his eyes at the barely-there joke. He doesn't say that there's very little point in investing in a new winter coat for him, either. The skin on the inside of his wrist tingles.

He'll tell Dean when they get to Burlington.

* * *

Burlington is a bust. It takes about twenty-four hours of digging around to determine that the culprit is very much alive and leave an anonymous tip to that effect with the police, plus another thirty minutes for Dean to decide no coat in the world is worth the traffic. New Jersey is also fifteen hundred miles from Lebanon, so they have two very solid days of driving ahead of them afterward.

Which is perfect, really. If there's anywhere Sam should tell Dean, it should unquestionably be the car. This is as close to an ideal pocket of time as they're likely to get. Sam will use it to explain the situation, and then to break the news about his decision, and then to let Dean rage a bit. Right after their next stop for gas.

They stop for lunch on the second day at a diner with a wraparound porch that would be inviting if it weren't pouring unseasonably cold rain. The food inside is run-of-the-mill and neither of them is inclined to linger; they eat, pay, and pee. On their way out, Sam sits to retie his boot on one of the wet plastic chairs on the porch. He pushes to his feet, and his vision blacks out.

Next thing he knows is the wet chair seat under his ass again, his pulse retreating from his eardrums like a passing jet engine, and Dean's fingers clamped on his face, ten hard, warm points digging into his skin. Dean's eyes are inches from his.

"Sammy?" he says, terse.

Sam blinks. "I'm fine, sorry, just—just a headrush. I'm fine."

Dean stares at him for a moment longer, then releases him abruptly, taking his hands away as if burned. He wipes the back of one over his mouth.

Sam swallows and tries standing again. This time it goes fine; whatever the effect was, it's passed. There's that same sense of something having washed away, though.

Dean isn't even cracking any jokes about fainting damsels. "I'm driving," he says curtly.

Sam rolls his eyes. "It's your turn for this leg, anyway."

The Impala lumbers through deep puddles as they rejoin the highway; soon they're up to speed, rain lashing at the windshield. It really shouldn't be this cold. It's barely autumn. Well, late September, but that _is_ barely autumn.

The days are long but the weeks are short.

Sam tries to push the thought aside, but this time he can't. His chest tightens as the anxiety rises in him, kept down to just barely on the right side of panic. Time. Time, time, time. Almost half a year gone. How did so many months slip away? He wants them back.

He's so wrapped up in his own thoughts and the rhythm of the windshield wipers clearing away the rain that he barely even registers that Dean has also fallen into silence until he speaks up from the driver's seat.

"I've been thinking."

Sam turns to face him.

It still takes Dean a minute to say what he wants to: "I'm gonna call Cas."

Sam processes that. "Good," he says softly.

It is good. Sam never seriously questioned the rift there that somehow became permanent, for a host of reasons: Mom; Jack; Chuck; the fact that for the period of time when the sudden absence of their only friend was fresh and raw, they had too much to do and Sam himself had nowhere near enough energy to delve into peacemaking. The fact that as dear as Sam had held Jack, he knew that Castiel had held him dearer. The fact that Sam's loss would have been less no matter what, because Sam still had Dean.

Most of all, the question of what they all meant to each other, and the fact that Sam has always known the limits of the answer. Jack's death had merely exposed the asymmetries that politeness required remain shrouded.

But Cas was still a loss. Has been a loss, for both of them. He's glad that Dean is finally ready to fix it. He's glad that Dean will have Cas around, after.

He ignores the voice that tells him he knows better.

He clears his throat and repeats, "Good."

Despite this conversation, he's still a little surprised when not two hours after they've gotten back to the bunker, Dean comes into the laundry room where Sam's dealing with their duffels and says, "I got through to him."

Sam stands with a pair of socks dangling from his hands. "Wow. Already?"

Dean's turn to clear his throat. He tucks the phone he's still holding into a pocket. "Yeah. We, uh—decided to meet on neutral ground, as it were. Which for whatever reason means Boulder. I'm gonna head over there, shouldn't be more than a day out, day back."

"Oh. Okay, um, that's great, let me just grab some fresh clothes."

"I, uh, I was gonna go alone. Need to talk to him about some stuff."

Sam blinks. It's the nearest to physically rocking back on his heels he allows himself. There's a twist of hurt, and confusion, and jealousy—and a little flash of _Why does my relationship matter less than yours?_ —but out loud he only says, "Of course. Do your thing. I'll keep an eye on the network."

Dean nods, looks around the laundry room, nods again, pats the metal cabinet he's been leaning against twice, and leaves.

It's a windfall and Sam should look on it as such. Two days with Dean out of the bunker is two days Sam can research lilin full-throttle, instead of in furtive bursts like he's been doing. He can pull all the references he wants at once without fear of Dean questioning his interest, map information on the wall of his room, chase down random hunches and work through wild theories.

He does all that and finds nothing new.

Dean checks in while he's still three hours out, so Sam has everything packed away again in plenty of time before the bunker door creaks open and, for the first time in a long time, not one set of boots but two sound on the stairs. "Sammy," Dean calls out, but Sam is already coming out from the library, brushing down his shirtfront.

Castiel looks older. Sam doesn't know precisely how that all works, whether the lines and bags that accumulate on Jimmy Novak's face are the toll of all the times the angel inside has been robbed of its powers, or whether Cas has willed them there, or what. But he looks even older than Sam and Dean do, and the years have been catching up with them of late.

When Castiel turns to Sam, Sam's palms go sweaty. He didn't even consider whether an angel would be able to see the curse on him. Jimmy Novak's blue eyes fix Sam's once, piercing, then scan up and down.

"Hey, Cas," says Sam.

Castiel smiles, and he doesn't look as old anymore.

Dinner is awkward, but that's to be expected and Sam's sure it'll pass. Cas coming back is a good development, an important development. The last thing Sam wants is for Dean to be alone when the clock runs out. If the idea of sharing their home in his last months sparks jealousy, at least he knows it's petty and, ultimately, beside the point. If it helps Dean, it's worth it.

Anyway, it's not like they've never done this before. Sharing the bunker is familiar. When Castiel says he needs to use the Men of Letters' archives to look into something and chooses Dean as a research assistant over Sam, that's new; and when Dean actually agrees, that's really new, but it makes sense, Sam supposes. They've been on their own here for so long: no wonder Dean jumps at the opportunity to spend time with someone else.

Sam absolutely does not take consolation in Dean's knuckles brushing the back of his neck when he leans over Sam's shoulder, because he has no reason to be hurt.

About a week and a half later Castiel shows up in the library, coat on, and says, "I have to attend to something."

Dean lowers his book; Sam looks up from his laptop. "Uh, okay," Sam says, when Dean doesn't.

"It's in Sarajevo."

Now Dean does speak up. "Wow, Europe. How long will you be gone?"

"A day at least. Possibly longer. I will text you if it will be longer."

It's a weirdly stilted conversation even for them and the circumstances. "No worries, Cas," says Sam. "We know you've got your own stuff. Come and go as you want, it's all good."

Castiel looks between him and Dean. "Okay," he says, and goes.

Dean shakes his head. "Over a decade on Earth, and the dude is still weird."

Sam laughs a little. "Or all of us are weird, and he's the only one reacting to life the way he should."

Dean flicks a tiny ball of paper at him. "You're weird." He closes his book. "So, what d'you wanna do while we've got the place to ourselves?"

It's kind of a dumb question. They've had the place to themselves, nonstop, for months running, and they didn't feel the need to do anything special about it other than install a washer/dryer. That Dean is asking now sends a not-unpleasant tingle down the back of Sam's scalp. "Dunno," he says, trying for casual. "Go out for dinner?"

"Got a better idea. You, me, a five-gallon bucket of popcorn, and a Chuck Norris marathon?"

Sam laughs. "Thought you'd wanna save that for Christmas."

 _"Die Hard_ is for Christmas."

"Yeah, yeah, I know." Sam checks his watch and enjoys the warmth in his belly while trying not to enjoy it too much. "All right. Yours or mine?"

"Mine, I ain't sitting on that slab of concrete you call a bed."

"Yeah, it can be challenging for older joints."

"Beg your pardon?"

Sam smiles innocently. They're both on the bad side of the age when these jokes were actually funny, but he's still the younger brother, and that's what counts no matter what else creaks. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. Time marches on. Entropy increases. Age will come for me as it has for you, I'm sure."

Dean stares at him. "You prematurely graying little bastard."

"I am not!"

A grin spreads over Dean's face, slow and wicked. He pushes up out of the chair and stalks closer. "Oh," he says, "did I hit a nerve?"

"You really didn't, but I know hitting anything is hard through the cataracts."

Dean plants one palm on the table next to Sam and bends down until their eyes are on a level. Then he reaches out with his other hand and slips his fingers, ever so delicately, into the hair at Sam's temple, and Sam's brain short-circuits.

Dean yanks.

"Ouch!"

Dean holds up a long, silvery strand, along with several other brown ones. "You were saying."

Sam scowls and snatches his hair back. Gross. "That's not _graying,_ it's achromatrichia."

"Yeah, Sam," Dean says, an incredulous verbal golf clap, "that's what gray hair is."

"Can I help you with something?" Sam says pointedly, like he's in an all-fired hurry to get back to slogging through his email. "Get out the tweezers, help you pull out your own grays, the ones you've got left, anyway?"

Dean straightens up. It leaves a sudden void where before his presence was vibrating right against Sam's face. "Let's spar," he says, apparently on impulse.

Sam pauses. They really should. Neither of them has logged any appreciable practice since Cas returned to the bunker, and a week plus is too long. "Yeah, okay," he says, and doesn't know why it makes his pulse pick up.

They don't change clothes. It's pointless to aim for comfort when they're practicing basic survival skills; their dad drummed that into them before they were ten and as much as Sam liked finding fault with John Winchester's logic, even he has always had to grant the man that one. So they just pick up and go down to the gym in their street clothes.

That is, they start toward the gym.

Dean attacks on the stairs, but Sam's watching for it. It's pretty much a love-tap—would be even if Sam didn't duck it—and Sam's answer is a feint followed by vaulting over the banister. All pretty standard: the main goal of any fight on a staircase is to get off of it as fast as possible. Sam lands in a crouch at the bottom, Dean follows suit, and it's on.

Backs hitting walls, fists hitting muscle; twist, turn, parry, repeat. It's rhythmic and somehow exciting and soothing all at once. Dean aims for a nut-shot, and Sam brings his knee up into Dean's solar plexus. Either one might be a disabling move in a real fight. The only reason neither one is now isn't that they're pulling their punches, but that they know each other too well for them to land.

There was a period in their hunting career when they had a string of losses that should have been easy wins. One screw-up spawned the next, and the rut just got deeper and deeper. People died. Tempers grew short. Neither of them said it, but they both blamed training with each other all the time. Always practicing on the same opponent, they began to be convinced, was making them rusty and costing blood. How could they stay sharp when they knew all their own moves?

But like any other art, hunting is as much about headspace as physical skill. And at some point a different realization overtook that worry: Monsters who'd never met them ought to be child's play when they'd honed their ability to hurt the person who knew them better than they knew themselves to an art, a science, and a religion.

Their reputation really took off after that.

Sam slams Dean against the wall with a foot on his instep and grins. Dean grins back and aims a right hook at a kidney. Sam breaks like water out of his own hold and flows backward through the door to the gym.

There's a wrestling mat in the middle of the room, but they don't make it that far. Dean goes in for an attack and Sam sweeps his legs out from under him, and they go down on the concrete. Dean grunts, driving his head up and into Sam's solar plexus as he falls; the move connects, and it forces a gasp out of Sam as well as leaving Dean's torso free instead of crushed under Sam's when they hit the ground.

Only their legs are tangled together, and Sam, still blurry from Dean driving his breath out, latches onto that on instinct. His own limbs are longer. That's a liability often as not, making him more susceptible to the kind of trip he just pulled on Dean overall, but it has its uses. He wraps his right leg through and around Dean's left, grappling them together pelvis to pelvis. 

Dean doesn't even try to break the hold. Instead he ducks in close for a head-butt. Sam shoots one hand out to Dean's shoulder, torques his legs, and lets Dean's own momentum twist him off path; his forehead slams into the God wound instead of Sam's face. It hurts like a bitch. It probably always will. But monsters aren't going to tiptoe around Sam's shoulder, so Dean doesn't either. The fire blooming out through his body is a measure of his brother's love for him.

Sam accepts the pain and the momentum that comes with it, translating this into rotation to roll right and, finally, pin Dean underneath him. Dean's head hits the floor when Sam's hand slams down on his shoulder. Sam locks his elbow, hitches in his hips, and sits on his brother, back straight, pressure on pelvis and sternum that Dean can't break without breaking Sam's form first.

Sweat drips from the tips of Sam's hair onto Dean's face. "You done there, old man?"

Dean tries to buck Sam off, but he doesn't have the leverage. "Yeah, yeah," he grumbles. "Get off me."

Sam makes like he's going to let go of Dean's collar, braces his knees wider like he's going to climb off of Dean's lap. He's expecting it when Dean surges up at the last moment, but to his credit, Dean knows he is. All part of the dance.

Dean flips them. He's still inside Sam's guard lower down, Sam's legs spread around him and ready to grapple, but his grip on Sam's arms is bruising. They pant into each other's faces.

Fuck, Dean's mouth is close.

Dean grinds his quad down into Sam's groin. It's meant to hurt—and fortunately, it does, lots. "Ready to call it quits here, young Padawan?"

The words are light, but Dean's growl is heavy with intent. Something liquid and warm starts to uncurl in Sam's belly. He swallows.

Dean's so close Sam can see his pupils dilate. His breath hitches, and something dark goes through his eyes. His posture shifts infinitesimally. Everything slows.

It's on pure instinct that Sam flips them, because his mind's gone totally blank. Dean's indignant squawk brings some rationality back online, and suddenly the world is back up to speed again; Sam goes for the throat and puts his full weight behind the hand on Dean's carotid. This time Dean does tap out, and Sam drops his hand instantly and rolls off and to his feet.

Headrush again. But maybe it's a normal one and nothing to do with the curse; it steals his vision for a few seconds, but he stays upright, and he can still hear Dean promising a rematch under the static in his head. When the black spots clear, Dean is climbing to his feet like nothing's wrong.

"Good one, Sammy," he says, clapping him on the shoulder—his intact one this time. "Not bad for a young buck."

"Workout?" Sam suggests.

"Yeah."

They head to their respective rooms to change and then torture-treat themselves to a nice, long block of gym time. Thence to the showers, where in some ways, it's easier to get naked in front of Dean than it is by himself. When it's them together after training, Sam remembers what his body's for, and the routine is sanctioned, familiar, safe. It's quick and comfortable, and by the time they head back upstairs to watch the movie, they're loose-limbed and laughing.

They pop popcorn, fix sandwiches, fetch beer, boot Netflix. Dean wants to watch _Delta Force,_ to which Sam agrees only on the condition of _Enter the Dragon_ as a chaser. They settle in on Dean's memory foam side by side, feet bare on the Men of Letters' blanket.

After _Enter the Dragon,_ Dean claims he wants to settle this argument about Chuck Norris's superiority once and for all, and that reviewing the training scene in _Delta Force 2,_ a film Sam has seen a minimum of three dozen times in the course of his life, will do it. Sam disagrees and is not about to leave Dean's bizarre streak of American chauvinism unchallenged, so he pulls up _Game of Death_ instead to present the pagoda sequence as exhibit A in his argument that where Norris is about power for the sake of survival, Lee is about survival for the sake of understanding; that where Norris is Hobbes, Lee is Tao; where Norris is utilitarianism, Lee is aesthetics, aspiration, philosophy.

Dean steals the remote and asks him where the fuck his philosophy is now.

"'Be like water, my friend,'" Sam intones. He drops his beer directly into Dean's lap, and Dean cusses liberally as he abandons the remote to catch the bottle.

"Dude, not cool," Dean grumbles, blotting a splash of beer from his thighs.

"Like this bed hasn't had worse." Sam hits play.

They break out the whiskey. By the time Lee is mounting the stairs toward the Temple of the Unknown, Sam and Dean are both boneless against the headboard, Sam letting Bruce's martial poetry flow over him, Dean sniping at the film's unnecessary flourishes to hide the appreciation they both know he shares. Sam's limbs are warm and heavy with Jack Daniels. Dean's arm is draped over the headboard behind him, fingers playing idly with the tips of Sam's hair.

It takes Sam a while to notice. He's absorbed, in the film and the memory foam and in the golden, honey-feeling of sore muscles, good movies, and home topped off with just the right amount of alcohol. When he does notice it, he's not immediately startled by it. It's just another perfect thing in a basically perfect moment, which means it's probably not really even happening anyway. He sighs and rubs his head back into the touch.

Dean's fingers pause for a moment before burrowing into his hair and down to the scalp to draw deep, richly satisfying circles there. Sam's mouth dries out even as his knees and elbows go to jelly.

He keeps his eyes riveted to the TV. His brain is tripping over itself, and he latches onto the noise-and-light box in front of him like the far side of a highwire, the only possible thing he can think of to get them safely over the gulf that's opened up under their feet. Just keep looking straight ahead. Don't look down. Don't look at Dean.

Sam looks.

Dean's lips are parted, pupils blown wide and whiskey breath ghosting over Sam's cheek. Oh, shit. They're falling.

He sees Dean swallow, sees his Adam's apple bob and the muscles under his jaw work. He sees the stubble move over his skin. He sees Dean's tongue dart out to his lower lip, just for an instant.

He sees Dean lever himself up on his side to hover over Sam.

As Dean's free hand nears his neck, Sam gets that buzzing sensation, the one from the game they used to play in the backseat as children, more intense than Sam's ever felt it in his life. Not even in the Cage did he ever guess his skin had this many nerve endings in it. When Dean's palm finally does land on Sam's pulse, it's warm and dry. It's been there a thousand times before. There's no reason this should feel like the first time.

Dean's eyes are wide, and, unmistakably, a little bit scared. His hand slides up into Sam's hair. His chest is warm under Sam's fingers, which apparently at some point spread over ribs and pectorals.

Just before he lowers his mouth toward Sam's, that fear shifts to determination.

Dean startles like a dog running into glass when Sam's arms abruptly go rigid, halting his descent. "Sammy?"

Sam feels sick. His heart is pounding in his ears, but it's not arousal now. "How long have you known?"

Dean freezes. "Known what?" he asks, after too long a pause.

Sam shoves him off violently. Dean shouts in pain when he hits the floor.

Sam doesn't know when he stood up. "When you—? All the times—? Oh, God." Someone's pulling his hair. Apparently it's him.

Dean climbs to his feet. "Sammy, no. Listen."

Sam thinks back over the last several weeks and every touch that's confused him, soothed him, and—no point denying it—turned him on, and categorically cannot believe his own stupidity. Of course. Of _course._ It's hard to say which is worse, the humiliation of not realizing what was going on or the humiliation of finding out his assumption that he's had Dean fooled has kept him blind to the fact that Dean's been fooling him.

This is, of course, Sam's fault.

"Sammy, listen to me, please." Dean's outright pleading already.

Sam shakes his head. "I do _not_ fucking want to hear it."

"Well, too bad! You owe me that much!"

"I don't owe you _that!"_ Even Sam's not sure what he means: the patience to hear Dean out? The embarrassment of finding out his brother knows about—? That his brother would—?

Dean charges on. "Yes, all right, I know, okay? You started acting weird and I started digging. Don't tell me you wouldn't have done the same."

Sam laughs, bitter with a hysterical edge.

"And I get it. I do, Sammy. I— God. I am not trying to embarrass you, here, okay? That's not what this is."

"All of this." Sam's not just referring to the movies or the booze. This plan of Dean's goes back much further. He started laying the groundwork weeks ago, started finding excuses to put his hands on Sam because he'd already decided that it was all going to lead to here. "You've been working up to this." Sam's back to feeling like he's going to throw up.

"It's not like that," Dean says strenuously.

"It's exactly like that. None of this— You're doing this for me. You're doing _this_ for me."

"Yes!" Dean's anguished. "Yes, of course I'm doing this for you! Do you seriously think, after all these years, that there is _anything_ I wouldn't?"

This time Sam's laugh isn't one.

"Sammy, look." Dean tugs at Sam's wrist. Sam doesn't even pull away; he just doesn't move his body at all, deadweight in his brother's grip. "You know me, you know I always gotta make a joke out of everything, but I am not gonna joke about this. After all the shit that's gone down, it—it makes sense that it wouldn't be easy for you." Dean swallows and steps back, finally dropping Sam's wrist. "When I figured out that you… hadn't, yet, I figured maybe, maybe if it was with someone you could trust." He doesn't meet Sam's eyes. "If that's not me, that's fine. It doesn't have to be. Cas will do it; hell, Jody—"

"Anybody else you'd like to pimp me out to?" Sam bites out.

Dean's head snaps up and he glares at Sam. "You do not get to be a bitch about this, Sam, not after hiding it for months. Not after lying again."

Something scarily like peace settles over Sam then. "I don't get to?"

"No, you rat bastard! Don't act like I'm the one treating this like a game! Whatever you need, you got it, but figure it out. Time's wasting, and you don't have a choice here. Get it done!"

Sam looks all around the room. Their empties are ranged on the ledge behind the bed. A dresser drawer is broken where Dean collided with it. The TV is still playing as Hai Tien descends the steps of the pagoda empty-handed. Sam lifts his arms, drops them at his sides, and looks back at his brother. "No."

Dean's only answer to that is a scrunched-up look of such complete incomprehension that Sam's torn between laughing and breaking his nose.

"The answer's no, Dean. Not with anybody."

There's this thing that happens when Dean is so at a loss that all he can do is blink rapidly, a stutter in his mind playing out on his face. It's happening now. "What exactly are you saying?"

"I'm saying: no."

Dean takes a step toward him. "Start making sense, Sam."

"I am making sense, whether or not it makes any sense to you."

"Oh?" Dean seems to inflate, shoulders rising, stance widening, hackles going up. But Sam's taller, and he's seen the pose too many times for it to work on him. "You got another cure for a succubus curse somewhere, then?"

"No," Sam tells him, "I don't."

He waits for it. He doesn't have to wait long.

Dean shakes his fist out after the punch. "What the hell is wrong with you, Sam?"

Sam's cheek stings. "I dunno, I feel like making my own decisions about what I do with my body?"

"There's no decision to be made here! That's the whole point, it's fuck or die!"

"The thing is, Dean, we disagree about the operative word in that phrase."

Dean scoffs. "What, for me it's 'fuck,' because I'm a one-track mind kind of guy, and for you it's _'die,'_ because apparently you just love doing that so much?"

"No, Dean, for _you_ it's 'die.' For me it's 'or.'"

Dean's pale with fury and with something else beneath. "This is not worth dying over, Sam."

Sam feels his own answering flush of anger. "You don't get to decide that."

"This is not the time for your sanctimonious act," Dean snarls. "You _hid_ this, for _months—"_

"And _this is why!"_

"Sorry that I give a shit about your life more than you do!"

"Too bad you can't seem to figure out it's actually mine!"

"Oh, do not, _do not_ start that crap up again, like you aren't the exact fucking same."

"Am I, Dean? Am I? Have I ever held you down for something else to shove its way inside you and then gotten the actual _Mark of Cain_ just to get out of coughing up so much as a 'whoopsie' for it?"

Dean's laugh is ugly. "Right."

"Yeah, I would let you die before I'd do that to you."

"Though why fuckin bother when you can get some civvies and most of our friends killed unleashing evil from the dawn of time instead, am I right?"

"You know, all this time, I really thought that after Michael, you finally understood, even if you never had the balls to say so. Guess I was wrong."

"Yeah, because this is exactly the same. I'm basically asking you to spread 'em for Lucifer just for shits and giggles, yep, that's definitely what's going on here, you fucking drama queen."

"You don't get it."

"No, I don't!" Dean says desperately. "Can we please just forget all that other shit? We're not talking about that! We're talking about you and me!"

The corners of Sam's eyes sting. "I know."

Stark fear has overtaken Dean's anger. "Sammy, please. Look. I meant it—anyone we know would do this for you. And yeah, I'm offering because you need it. But if you're saying no because you think I don't—" It seems to cost him an effort to look Sam in the eye, but he does. "If it's because you think I'd never even consider this if it weren't your life on the line, then that's not true."

There's an aching wound where Sam's heart should be. "I know. I always have. It isn't that."

Dean's face screws up in pain. "Is it really that terrible for you, then?"

"You know it isn't." Any other day and that would be an unthinkable thing to admit. "That isn't the problem. It's just that for once in my life, I can make my own decision."

"Yeah, except you're making the decision for both of us!"

"Yes! Yes, I am making this decision for both of us! I'm deciding, not at the end of a gun, okay? Not like this!"

Dean stands there so long he turns the exact shade of gray Sam is used to seeing on him in instances of impalement and evisceration. "Dean," Sam says, but he cannot bring himself to say, _I'm sorry._

"And what am I supposed to do?" Dean asks him.

"I don't know."

"You don't know? You don't know. Right. Why should you? Not your problem."

Sam closes his eyes. "Of course it's my problem." It couldn't be any more his if his own flesh were asking, and by the same token he knows it's Dean's he's condemning. "It just doesn't change anything."

"It doesn't change anything?" The words are flat and cold. "Well, that's your choice."

Sam opens his eyes. "Yes, it is."

Dean looks at him for a long interval. "I was wrong. This isn't some half-baked impulse thing. You've really thought this through."

"Yes, I have."

"You're a bigger bastard than I thought."

"Yes," says Sam, "I am."

Dean leaves.

* * *

There aren't a lot of places in the bunker Sam can go and be sure of not encountering his brother. Like the car, it's always been more Dean's than his. Also like the car, however, there are things within it that have always been more Sam's than Dean's. One is the archives; another is the gym.

Sam nudges the heavy bag. It creaks on its chain and swings a little. He pushes it again. It swings farther away, swings closer back.

He hits until his knuckles break open. That takes a while, because he's trained without gloves his entire life. His arms and legs work economically and his shoulder aches in exactly the same way with each blow. Even when the skin finally does split, not all that much changes beyond the color of the bag.

It's not an outpouring of rage. Either he's empty of rage or his rage is empty; he doesn't know which, but no matter how long he hits this bag this brand of violence doesn't match the emotion inside, and there is no catharsis. He keeps going regardless, feels the rhythm, feels the sweat. His body still works. He is still strong. He is still him. He waits for the weakness to rise up, but it never does.

Morning finds them both in the library and the same clothes. They exchange terse monosyllables now and again. Sam thinks about saying something like, _That isn't how I wanted to tell you,_ but it would be too much like an apology. Of course, Dean deserves an apology for that part, but he would take it as Sam apologizing for—Sam backing down over—so much more, and Sam can't deal with the siege that would result. Standing this ground takes enough effort as it is. Suspiciously, Sam wonders why Dean hasn't gone tearing out on a bender or a drive yet; it's not like him.

The bunker door shrieks open.

At opposite ends of the room, Sam and Dean both push to their feet. Castiel comes down the stairs, opens his mouth, looks between them, and closes it again.

"Oh," is all he says.

A muscle works in Dean's jaw. He doesn't look at Sam or Cas. "Going for a drive," he says, and turns on his heel. The door slams after him.

Castiel looks like he wants to say something, but after hesitating for a long time, he retreats from the library, and Sam hears his footfalls drift slowly toward the room he's been staying in.

Dinner is a stilted affair. Cas doesn't need to eat, and Sam doesn't much want to, simultaneously flattened out and keyed up the way only all-night battle can produce. They're shifting pieces of zucchini around when Castiel finally says, "Dean told me about your problem. He had inferred that you had difficulty effecting the usual remedy. I agreed to help look for another. I haven't found one."

"Neither have I."

Castiel searches his face for a minute. "I don't think there's an alternative cure, Sam."

Sam returns his gaze. "I don't, either."

Castiel looks troubled. "I see."

Cutlery scrapes on plates.

Castiel seems to debate for some time before he says, "I'm sorry I deceived you."

 _Me, too,_ Sam doesn't say. "It's fine."

"I'll keep looking," Castiel says. "I'll do everything I can."

"Thanks."

Castiel hesitates again. "I can't stay here. I have responsibilities elsewhere."

Sam doubts that's the whole reason. He doesn't love that Cas was in on Dean's plan, although he gets it. But that wasn't even Dean in a corner. This isn't over, and there are worse ways to use someone than to shore up a lie. Perhaps Cas intuits more about what those might be than Sam does himself.

"Where will you be?" Sam asks.

"Intermittently on Earth. I meant it—I'll look everywhere I can, in either realm." Cas glances at Sam's side, where Sam has a tattoo that human eyes can't see. "Would you like me to make it possible for you to pray to me again?"

Sam's tongue goes thick with nausea at the suggestion. Very little of the reason for it is Castiel's fault, though, so he doesn't let the feeling show. "No. Thanks, though."

"All right. Call by other means, if you want to, any time you want to. I'll come."

"Thanks."

There's no more conversation after that. Sam is tired and he hurts in places Castiel's grace couldn't reach if it tried. They are friends and comrades and it's been ages since they were alone in a room together, but Sam kind of wishes the guy would leave so that he could just feel this.

Somewhere Dean is raging, Dean is screaming, Dean is having his heart torn out and shredded. Sam is doing it to him.

Dean won't be long, though. He won't go far, and he won't take off on a hunt, because there's always a chance he won't return if he does. He'll be back soon. However much it hurts to come back, letting the time go to waste, _knowing_ the time is going to waste, would be unbearable. Sam knows from experience.

Sam's pissed that Dean dumped him here with Castiel, that he specifically held off until Cas got back so Sam would be supervised. He's more than pissed enough to hotwire the motorcycle and tear out of here himself, get some fucking air, get _away,_ but he doesn't because his brother might return while he's out, he might miss whole minutes or hours or days, and he can't bear to part with the time any more than Dean can.

* * *

Dean's back in under thirty-six hours. In the library, Sam and Castiel both stand up when they hear the door. Dean comes down the stairs and faces Sam.

Both the bruise on his jaw and the scabs on his knuckles are expected. The red around his eyes does nothing to soften the look in them. His face is carved with anger and fear; he's leaning forward, ready for a fight, ready to protect, with nothing before him to attack.

"We're finding another cure," he says.

Sam, who does not actually want to die, says, "Okay."

"That's it. That's what we're doing. Fuck every other hunt."

And because he's been on the other side of this, in contexts that sucked a lot more, to be frank, Sam again says, "Okay." But because it has to be said, he adds, "There might not be one, Dean. I've been looking, and I don't want to run out my clock doing something pointless. I'm not saying we give up. I don't want to give up. I just want balance."

"Balance," Dean says flatly.

"Yes, Dean. If it's my last months of life, I want to spend them actually living. I want—" He wraps his hands around his biceps, wishing they were unobserved. "I want my brother."

The look on Dean's face is shockingly ugly for there being a third person in the room. "Apparently not."

"Dean, you have to promise me—"

"Don't you _dare."_

Sam shuts up.

* * *

"It's a fuckin bird-lady," Dean says as they mount the stairs of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, knees in gray wool, feet in wingtips. "We took out _God._ How hard can it be?"

Sam looks up at the tympanum over the doors, where an Egyptian scribe passes the gift of writing to a bare-chested Roman, and smiles. "Should be doable."

It's a beautiful day. The sun is warm on his face, and with his brother beside him, he believes it.

It's getting cold.

* * *

Chicago doesn't have any answers, but it leads to a contact in Paris, who leads to contacts in Ankara, Athens, and Cambridge. They make the trek out to Harvard, Dean driving while Sam writes emails in the passenger seat, and they've amassed over a thousand pages of scans before they even make it to Massachusetts.

It all wants cross-referencing in the Men of Letters' archives. Since the Lebanon outpost was never meant to function independently, Sam has long since become accustomed to running down citations that turn out to be stored in locations that are inaccessible or destroyed, but Cas is able to fetch some of them. Aaron's helpful here, too; the Men of Judah aren't exactly booming, but they're still there, and he's been growing the network steadily. He's able to supply Sam and Dean with a wealth of primary sources on lilin and lilim, from the nineteenth century on back into proto-Judaism.

None of them tell them anything new, but they're fantastic sources.

They're in North Carolina to see a root doctor who comes highly recommended when Sam faceplants into the cereal bar of a Knights Inn. When the now-familiar black static recedes, he finds himself sitting on the tile with Cheerios in his hair and Dean's hands around his arms.

"Oh, Lord," somebody murmurs from nearby, at the same time somebody else asserts, "Merciful Jesus."

"Come on," says Dean, hoisting him to his feet and propelling him back down the hall toward their room.

Dean's having to do way more of the work than he should have to, too. Sam's usually fine right after one of these, but this time his legs are jelly and he can't stop his hands shaking. Fuck. _Fuck._ Of all of them for Dean to see, it had to be this one.

Back in the room now, Dean deposits Sam in the sagging armchair by the door. "You been having a lot of these?" he asks. He sounds angry. He is angry. Not as angry as he is afraid, but very, very angry.

"No," Sam lies. His teeth chatter when he does it, and that's new.

Once they spent the night in the car out in the middle of nowhere, Arizona, beside a nothing river that the road atlas said turned into a tributary to the Colorado a hundred miles on. There wasn't much to it where they stood. Just a silty creek cutting through a plain of fine, gray particulate soil and pebbles. It was early spring, March, maybe. Sam still remembers standing on the banks as twilight and the cold came on, listening to a sound like muted thunder as every few seconds, whole meter-deep crescents of embankment calved off into the river. A totally unremarkable stream of water carving the landscape, and not slowly, either. Not something measurable on a geologic timescale, but something they themselves could see. Something they watched.

He's shaky and cold and it doesn't go away for hours afterward. When he has another episode a few days later it's nothing like this one, it's a nothing pebble-drop like all the others he's gotten used to, but the root doctor concludes her reading in under ten minutes and says she can't do anything.

* * *

Because of the abbess's account, Sam knows generally what's going to happen to him. He'll get cold, he'll get weak, and then he'll die. It's not a particularly bad death. He hates the cold, though.

Outside Indianapolis, Dean fucks a bride, two bridesmaids, and the actual maid, and Sam has to stay with him in the bathroom afterward while he vomits and clutches Sam's collar. Sam unquestionably deserves it. His knowing he deserves it doesn't help Dean any.

* * *

It's night. Sam's in his bed in the bunker. As he lies there, he whispers, "Dean."

Dean isn't there. Sam's just pretending that he is. He's started doing that: pretending that his brother is right behind him in the dark; pretending that his own arm around his middle is Dean's and that it will squeeze him back.

"I'm afraid." He keeps to a whisper even though he's alone. "Seems stupid. I know I shouldn't be, after everything, but I am. And especially knowing that you'll—"

But he can't say that one out loud, even like this.

* * *

They go to Jody's for Christmas. Sam has to fight for it; Dean doesn't want to take the time, but Sam reminds him, _Balance, Dean, we agreed._ When that doesn't work ( _I didn't agree to shit_ ), he changes tactics: _Please, Dean._

So they go.

Dean turns down the radio when they're about fifteen minutes away. "Are you going to tell her?" he asks, eyes on the road.

"No."

If Dean thinks that makes him an absolute piece of shit, he doesn't say so. After a minute looking out the window at a tree stand doing brisk business, Sam asks, "Are _you_ going to tell her?"

Dean flips on his turn signal. It snowed here a few days ago, but now the sun is bright. "It's your show."

Jody comes down the front steps to greet them, big smiles and warm hugs. She helps them hump their gear inside, pretty much the last friend they have they'd let do that, and Sam luxuriates in the novelty of accepting a cup of coffee without having to unpack and ward up first. Alex, it seems, is spending this Christmas with her fiancé, since Jody got both of them last year. Claire is in Texas and won't be in until New Year's. Jody pushes a plate of peppermint-fudge cookies at them and says she's glad they're here, and even after all this time, Sam is still a little thrown by how much she means it.

On the twenty-fourth, they do the tree thing and follow it up with a big dinner. Jody has to work the actual day of, but sleeping in and then lounging around her house drinking cocoa and eating leftovers is still pretty awesome. On the twenty-sixth, in the evening, they drive out to Bobby's.

The property is tied up in probate and it's not a piece of land anybody much wants, so it's easy to break into and largely untouched inside the fence line. The scar where the house used to be is hidden under a thin blanket of snow; the only thing left underneath is the panic room. Sam's relieved when Dean doesn't want to go down to visit it. He does, sometimes.

The wrecks are all pretty much where they were a decade previous. Kids have started coming in here, judging by the occasional beer can and condom wrapper, but the property isn't exactly central and it's not very many kids. He and Dean have it to themselves. They wander through the tall-stacked husks of cars in the moonlight, settling finally on the hood of a rusted out '78 Camaro.

It's frigid and clear. Sam bounces his knee for warmth, hands jammed deep in his pockets. "I didn't get you anything this year," he says.

Dean's inches away, in the same posture as Sam's but keeping still. "I didn't, either."

They watch the stars for a while. Without looking down, Dean says, "I'll give you twenty questions."

Sam toys with a bit of fluff in his pocket. "Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

Dean pulls a theatrically evaluative expression, tipping his head from side to side. "Could be any of the above."

The edge in his tone is a better clue than any of the answers are going to be. "Is it something normal people would just come out and say?"

"Wouldn't know."

"Is it about me?"

"Not everything is."

"Yeah, but is it?"

"Only because you're making it that way."

"I give up," says Sam, who doesn't but just wants to cut to the chase here. "What is it?"

"Winchester rules, Sam; what _isn't_ it?"

"Yes, Dean, I remember—"

"—A point to this." Dean jams the heel of his boot into the Camaro's grille, bringing his knee up between them. "A reason for this farewell tour. Any reason at all."

Sam breathes deeply of the cold, dry air and tries to let go of the anger. He doesn't have time for it.

After a second, Dean speaks again, quieter. "I'm trying to understand. I honestly am. Just… explain it to me. Please."

Sam studies the sky, searching for an explanation that won't set off Dean's anger before his brother can actually hear it. "It's not the act that I have a problem with," he says finally. "It's the coercion. Sex, okay, fine, no big. But not with a gun to the side of my head. You know?"

"Everybody does shit they don't want to do." Frustration is plain in Dean's voice. "Hell, you are all _about_ that, Mr. 'I get up at ass-crack o'clock to go running because that's called being healthy.' And dude, I know I rag on you, it's my duty as a big brother, but you can have whoever you want."

Part of the problem here is that Sam doesn't know how much is Dean not getting it versus Dean refusing to get it. He changes tack. "I'm not saying it doesn't matter, and I'm not saying I don't give a damn," he says, choosing his words carefully despite knowing there is no way to say this that will not be received very poorly, "but the stakes are lower for us than they've ever been. Right?"

Because the thing is, they really are. He's not going to Hell, he's not going to the Empty. He's just getting the same deal everybody else does. Death herself said so when God took forced retirement. There's nothing special about them anymore. It's been so long since that was true that a shot at what's waiting for him now has been, for most of their lives, the ultimate prize. They've now secured it.

Dean's long silence confirms that this argument is not going over well.

Sam says it. "There've been too many times I didn't have a choice."

"So you're choosing to kill yourself," Dean says flatly.

"I'm not committing suicide, Dean."

"Could've fooled me."

"No, I couldn't have. Play dumb all you want, but I know you aren't." Sam takes a minute to steel himself before he finally says, "And we don't talk about it, but I know we've both got history."

Dean goes very still beside him. Then he turns to Sam. "Yeah. We do. And what you're doing now, Sam? I wouldn't do this. I wouldn't do this to you."

Sam's been bracing himself to hear those words for months. It doesn't make it any easier to hear them now. "You're not me."

Dean's smile looks like a knife in the moonlight. "That's for damn sure."

Okay, _that,_ on the other hand, does make it a little easier. "Nice, Dean. That's nice."

Dean slumps, and it's hard to believe there was a cutting edge in him a moment ago. "Just give me something. I'm trying, Sammy. I swear that I am."

Sam watches their breath curl up into the stars. "I'm not sure I can explain it in a way that you'll understand. It's—it's not any one thing I can point to, it's everything. It's Lucifer, yeah. It's Meg. It's Gadreel. It's Azazel." Dean doesn't know about Toni; Sam knows he can't name Ruby. "But at the same time, it's nothing to do with any of them. It's just me. It's just how it has to be. It's what I have to do."

Dean doesn't answer, but he frowns up at the moon for a long time.

* * *

Sam slams awake, gasping. Hands. There are hands on his chest—

"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Dean backs up, holding his hands up in a band of moonlight spilling between the blinds of Jody's spare bedroom.

"Dean?" Sam's disoriented from the jarring crash from deep REM sleep into waking.

"You were having a nightmare." Dean tucks his hands in the pockets of his borrowed robe, watching.

Sam swallows. His heart is still pounding, but he has no idea what the nightmare was about. "Oh."

It occurs to him to wonder what Dean is doing in here in the first place. The guest room only has one bed, and it's a twin; they've been taking turns in here and on the couch. Sam hopes like hell he didn't wake Jody.

"You been having a lot of those?"

Sam opens his mouth, shuts it. "No more than normal," he says finally. Dean's unmoved posture says he knows that's a lie. Or maybe only Sam's paranoia says that; hard to tell at this point. "What're you doing up here?" he asks to change the subject.

Slowly Dean pulls his hand out of his pocket. There's a package in it. "I lied," he says. "I got you something."

Feeling very small, Sam takes the present. It's wrapped in a page out of _Automotive Weekly_ from August. His fingers find something hard and rectangular inside.

He tugs the Scotch tape free and rips the paper. The back of a picture frame is revealed. Pulling the rest of the paper off, Sam turns it over.

The light's not great, so it takes him a minute to realize what he's seeing. It is a picture of him with his mother. It is a picture of only him with his mother, Dean not present, John presumably holding the camera in what must be the hospital where he was born. Sam has never seen a picture of himself with Mary only. He didn't think any existed.

"Where did you find this?" he asks.

"That storage locker Dad kept in Carson City." Sam remembers. They transferred the contents to the bunker years back; they mostly catalogued it, but things kept happening, and they never got through all the boxes. "Thought you might want it."

Sam stares at the picture. In it, Mary has a slight double chin, her face rounder than he ever saw it either in life or in documentation, the way the faces of women who were pregnant only hours or minutes earlier sometimes are. She looks exhausted. She looks completely happy.

Sam's a purple-faced hot dog, of course.

"Thank you," he finally tells his brother. It's about all he can say; this isn't 1991, and he has no newspaper-wrapped parcel held in reserve.

"Yeah." Dean hovers where he handed over the present. "You good to get back to sleep?"

"Yeah, I'm good." Sam sets the picture on the nightstand and lies back down to prove it. "Goodnight, Dean."

"Goodnight, Sam."

Sam closes his eyes. "See you in the morning."

* * *

Dean is cheerful for their last day and night with Jody, but Sam can tell it's costing him. He's pretty sure even Jody can, by the end, but before it reaches the point of her pulling Sam aside to ask what's going on with Dean, Claire's arriving, and the Winchesters are packing up the car. That opposing pull of distractions nets them a clean getaway, for better or worse.

On the drive back, Dean is quiet, unexpressive, shut down. Sam can feel the defeat coming off of him. About five miles over the Kansas state line, however, he feels a shift. It's subtle at first, just a small change in Dean's posture; then his driving speed begins to pick up, and the radio along with it, increasing gradually from Inoffensive Citizen to Dean Winchester on a Mission, until they're flying down the highway with Zeppelin III blaring.

When they get to the bunker, Dean doesn't even drop his duffel in his room before he crosses to the library, pulls a fresh legal pad out of a drawer, and starts dumping piles of books and dead ends onto the floor in a corner.

"I'm fixing this," he tells Sam. "You made your choice. This is mine."

* * *

Dean's good at research. He's good at it because he's smart, because it's a requirement of the job, and because he's John Winchester's son, and while Dean bitches about it sometimes, he still gets absorbed in the process and finds satisfaction in the results. This is the first time, however, Sam has ever seen his brother throw himself at an archive with exactly the same total focus as a physical opponent in front of him

It's not helping. They're not making any more headway than they were before. None of the references they run down for the fifteenth time pan out any better than they did on the fourteenth. That doesn't matter. Dean keeps coming.

He's clocking way more hours at it than Sam is, an unsustainable number of hours, and of course Sam recognizes this particular form of self-torture, but for the same reason he also knows it has to play out. He's not going to be able to talk Dean into Netflix breaks. It would be insulting of him to try.

For himself, though, he needs to get out of the bunker. He needs to be outside, to feel the cold air scouring his lungs, to catalogue all the curves of the gravel road they live on and the colors of the light on the fields. He needs to walk through Lebanon now and again and see the families turning up for church, see the neighbors chatting in the parking lots, see the kids being asshole kids. He'd lose his mind if he didn't. Also, he gets tired easily these days.

So he isn't actually there when Dean solves it.

Sam gets back with a bag of winter apples that cost more than they're probably worth and Dean's in the library, same as ever. He's bent over a spread of books and scribblings, same as ever. Every line of his body is strung tight, same as ever. It's not until Dean lifts his head that Sam realizes everything has changed.

He has no idea where he throws the apples.

"Where?" he demands.

"Would you believe Pastor Jim?"

"Huh?"

"That Carson City lockup," says Dean. The same one where he found the picture he gave Sam for Christmas. "Dad had some stuff from Pastor Jim. One was an address book. Most of the people in there are dead and the ones who aren't didn't know shit, but one guy he was at seminary with who didn't even know Jim's dead said he knew a guy who knows some Zoroastrians who live in some fucking two thousand year-old monastery cut out of solid rock in the desert somewhere. Said he'd see what he could do about getting his contact in to digitally catalogue their library."

Sam feels dizzy, and he's ninety percent sure it's not the curse. "And?"

"And that was months ago, and I didn't say anything because I didn't hear anything. Then Seminary Dude emails out of the blue and says yeah, he got in contact with that friend, and yeah, he's willing to go trek into the desert with an expensive as fuck camera and take pictures of these manuscripts the monks have been copying and recopying by hand since sometime before Alexander the Great. Which he does, and he sends the pictures over, and he says he'll have to powwow with a professor he knows in Tehran to get me a clean translation, but I'm looking for anything to do with _lilitu,_ right? 'Cause there's this one page."

Dean's breathing a little fast. His hair's askew. His eyes— "Might have to get Cas to help us track down the ingredients, but—Sammy, it's a recipe. It's an antidote."

Sam's breath stops. The moment before his fingers make contact with the paper Dean's holding out, an electric charge seems to jump the gap.

A door Sam's been keeping shut in his mind unlocks and swings open. What lies beyond it is a future. It's not a perfect future. In many ways, it's as fucked up as their present, because it wouldn't be them if it wasn't. But it's a future where they can have everything. It's a future where there's no reason not to. They can be the things to each other that they've never dared to be, because they've been too afraid of too many worse things to be scared any more of what it might change. And Sam is catching Dean's grin like a fever, because if this works, as soon as it's over, they can fuck like madmen and neck like teens, and even if they die the day after they will always have had that.

He takes the paper.

It's a printout of an HQ picture somebody else printed out, wrote on, and scanned. The general format is familiar from countless other ancient magical recipes: there are a few lines of text with the handwritten translation interlinear, and illuminations in the margins of plants, animals, and animal parts, also labeled in both the ancient and modern hands.

Sam's eyes are drawn to an illustration of a seed, about an inch long on the page, carefully rendered. It has a distinctive shape: it's a perfect, Valentine's Day cardioid.

His heart sinks.

"Dean, the first ingredient is silphium. It calls for silphium seeds."

"Yeah, I know, the translation's right there."

Sam puts the paper down, holding only the edges. "Silphium went extinct around 300 to 200 BCE."

Dean's grin dims. "What?"

Gingerly, Sam squares the paper on the desktop, staring at the illumination. It stares back up, mocking him. No wonder the shape on the lili's dart seemed familiar. "Silphium grew in Cyrene, a Greek city in Libya. It was an ancient contraceptive and aphrodisiac; it's thought to be the source of the heart symbol for love today. Demand for it was so high in the Hellenistic world it was harvested to extinction sometime before Nero."

Dean's no longer smiling. "Extinct doesn't mean gone. There could be some stashed somewhere, like in an ancient tomb, or something."

"It's organic matter, Dean. Unless it was specifically preserved, it would have decayed. Even with preservatives, twenty-three hundred years is a long shot. And we'd have to find some, first."

"Okay. So we get Cas to take us back—"

"Dean." Sam says it gently.

Dean stands up, sending his chair clattering over backwards. Sam doesn't stop him charging out of the room.

* * *

They try the antidote with all the closest botanical relatives to silphium they can identify, which are mostly varieties of fennel, as well as an ancient substitute for it that's still extant in North Africa. When Sam has another episode, they know none of it has worked.

New Year's is in the rearview; January slides into February. Dean watches from the corners, and Sam begins to live in dread.

* * *

_I'll invite Cas back,_ Sam thinks. _We'll be safe that way. And he understands; it'll barely be like he's here, probably._ Which is a terrible thing to hope for, of course, but Sam is willing to be a lot worse than a shitty friend if it buys him an iota more of his brother's company in his last time on Earth.

He ignores the voice that points out that Castiel's discretion won't do anything about the underlying issue of not being able to trust his brother during that time.

When Dean gets blinding drunk one day, so profoundly shitfaced that Sam doesn't dare leave him and at more than one point considers taking him to a hospital, horrible as it is, he actually sees it as a good sign. Alcohol has long been Dean's way of coming to terms with things. Sam hates the damage his brother is doing to himself, but—any terms are better than none. Because Dean's been pacing more and more lately, on muscles strung tighter and tighter, and everybody knows what happens to cities in a sack.

The drinking episode doesn't put Sam at ease. He is on guard, always. But there's a certain resignation underneath: the knowledge that if Dean really wants to try something, the only truly effective defense Sam has is not to be here.

Three days later, Dean's still recovering. Physically recovering. It was bad. Sam's under no illusions, and has very few hopes, but he can't not pray, desperately, that the poisoning he just witnessed won't be how Dean follows him. Anyway, Sam handles the cooking for now. He's never had Dean's pizazz in the kitchen, but he's serviceable, and he understands (or cares about) basic biology enough to ply his brother with a steady stream of nutrients and liquids.

Sam sets two bowls of chicken soup down on the table and returns to the sink to put the pot in soak. Dean's hunched over, as he has been since he woke up. The circles under his eyes are retreating slowly, but not for lack of Dean trying to keep them there. Sam sits, curls around the heat his bowl offers, and tries to be subtle about it. The fatigue isn't too bad, usually, but he's always cold now.

"What's on the agenda for tomorrow?" Dean asks into his soup.

Sam glances up. "I'd've thought I should be asking you that."

Dean shrugs. "Got a list of people to follow up with by email, probably take a few hours, but I figured, might be nice to get out of here for a while. Hit the town. Catch some rays. Play some Frisbee in the park."

A bad joke. Kansas is ugly in the snow. "No, yeah, sounds good, we need to do some grocery shopping. Maybe take a half day and go up to Great Island, get all the other stuff that's been on the list for a while?"

"Yeah, okay."

"Eat your soup," Sam prods.

Dean grimaces. "Tastes like shit."

"Hey, I slaved over a hot can opener to make that." The soup has in fact been heavily supplemented with fresh vegetables and protein, but still. Sam feels a twinge of anxiety. It's unusual for Dean to be so rude to him when it's not in service to a cheap joke, and it's way unusual for him to go off his feed when not actively drinking; which, he hasn't touched a drop other than in his morning coffee since the bender, Sam would put money on it.

"I'll eat if you eat," says Dean.

"I _am_ eating."

Dean scoffs.

"What?"

"You think I haven't noticed, Sam? The extra layers, the low energy? When we eat together, you barely touch it. It's like you want to speed this up," he finishes bitterly.

Sam blinks. Has he really not been eating? He's been actively trying to stay as healthy, as _present_ as possible; he didn't think he's been skimping on calories. But the other things are true, so maybe he has been without noticing.

And Dean definitely looks like shit.

"I'll finish mine if you finish yours," Sam says.

"Fine."

They finish the soup. After, Dean wants to have a drink there in the kitchen, insists on it, and it's such an improvement over him staring dead-eyed at the wall that Sam caves. Maybe Dean learned something from this last round in the ring with heavyweight Jose, too, because he takes his time even though it's just a beer, nursing it. Afterward, he volunteers to clear up since Sam cooked; he waves Sam back to his seat as he takes the dishes over to the sink and makes chitchat over the suds. His mood must be lifting.

When Sam finally stands after the meal, he gets a now-familiar rush of black across his vision together with a tilt to the room that's new. He sits right back down again, eyes shut against sudden nausea.

"—Sammy?"

Dean's voice is tight. He's seen several of these episodes by now, but they still wig him out.

Like prodding at a lost tooth, Sam examines himself for the sense of diminishment he's come to associate with the curse-bouts, but he doesn't find it. There's just that nausea, receding to a background level.

"I'm fine," he says. "It wasn't even a bad one. Come on, if you want to make it to Grand Island before noon tomorrow we'll have to get moving early."

Dean sticks close as they make their way out of the kitchen, down the hall, through the map room. A strange, clammy cold prickles across Sam's skin, different from the slow drain inside he's become accustomed to.

It's as they're turning into the corridor that leads to their bedrooms that the world pitches sideways. The nausea surges up, and the soup almost follows it. His motor coordination doesn't come back.

He's been drugged enough times to know it won't.

Dean's hands are on him, under his arms and around his waist, holding him up. Sam can smell him.

"No," Sam breathes.

"I gotcha, Sammy." Dean's voice sounds strangled.

The floor bucks again and then Sam's going down. His heart is pounding, fight-or-flight desperation, but his body won't obey any of the signals his brain is screaming at it.

He tries anyway. He stumbles to his feet somehow and takes off running; when he crashes into the wall and ends up on the floor again, he crawls. When he collapses on his front, he turns over.

Whatever was in the soup has his vision dancing and flickering. He can barely make out Dean's face over him. Dean's crying.

"Don't do this," Sam begs him. "Don't do this to me. Don't do this to both of us."

Dean's hands on his belt buckle, Dean's tears hitting his face. Sam can't see anymore. He feels like Dean is saying something, but Sam can't really hear anymore, either.

He hopes it's not _Forgive me._

* * *

Sam comes to on a hard surface. Two hard surfaces: one under his hip, one at his back. They must form an angle. Floor appears under his eyes. That makes the surface behind him a wall. Hallway.

It's several minutes of swallowing and shivering before he gets it together enough to push himself upright. Something smells. A few feet down the hall, he glimpses vomit. It looks relatively fresh.

Very slowly, he takes stock of himself. He does this without looking up or moving, nothing that would attract attention, not attention of any kind. His boots are still on and tied the way he tied them. His shirts are still on, still too thin. His jeans are still on, correctly, not twisted around his legs and his boxers the way they are when someone else pulls them back up. His belt is still in place. The punched end of it is sticking out, but the metal tongue of the buckle is still snug through the hole in the leather. His underwear is dry.

Sam swallows again, this time to get his tongue in working order, and looks up.

Dean is sitting beside him. He doesn't react to Sam's movement. He stares at the opposite wall a lot like the way he once stared at their father's burning corpse.

"I hate you," he says.

There's no question he means it. Sam stares at the wall beside him. "I know."

For a long while, that's all of it. The pounding in Sam's head retreats to manageable levels; his limbs are still heavy, but the joints are beginning to work. The state of the puddle down the hall suggests he wasn't out for more than a couple of hours.

"Do you remember the year after you made your deal?" Sam says.

"Nah." Dean's tone is as flat as Kansas. "Doesn't ring any bells."

"And you remember Doc Benton? The organ-harvester. The news reports made it sound kind of like maybe zombies. I pitched the case that way, too, even though I suspected what he really was because I'd been looking for him."

"Yes, Sam, I remember."

Sam wets his lips. "After I found his journal, I—I told you it was all just science, that there wasn't any black magic in there, but I lied to you."

"Yeah, no _shit,"_ Dean says to the wall. "How stupid do you think I fucking am?"

Sam presses on. "And you said no, and I didn't force you. I've asked myself a million times since if I regret not forcing you. Not just while you were in Hell, Dean; after, long after, even after it seemed like you were doing better, even after you said you were glad to be alive and I believed you. I asked myself this question _last week._ And I haven't always known the answer."

He presses his head back into the tile behind them. They're about fifty yards from where Dean once swung the hammer, maybe. "Sometimes I think that not being able to say that for sure, that I wouldn't do it if I got a do-over on Benton, that that's why I was able to forgive you for Gadreel even though you never earned it, like, at all."

"Is that what this is?" Dean flicks a nail he's torn off away. "Revenge?"

Sam has asked himself the same thing. With his history, he had to. But for once in his life, he is sure of this much. "It's not what it is," he says. "Might be happening, a little, but it's not what it is. Not even close."

Dean stays silent, but Sam doesn't think it's because he actually disagrees.

"There's no moral here," Sam says. "Like, I can't say even now that it's all clear to me; that with everything that's happening, I accept your decision back then once and for all and I'm glad I respected it and kumbayah. Nothing's clear. Everything's tangled up. But I'm asking you: please. Because—because despite what I just said, there's a part that is clear. I still can't explain it, but I don't think I have to, Dean."

Dean keeps his gaze locked on the opposite wall, muscles working in his jaw.

Sam is stiff and sore and ill with the aftermath of poisoning. "I need to go to bed," he says, and begins the long process of getting himself upright.

Dean gets to his feet beside him, but doesn't touch. Sam shakes his head like an animal, trying to clear the wooziness enough to walk.

"Do you want me to help you get back to your room?" Dean keeps his eyes somewhere around Sam's hands.

"Thanks," says Sam, "but I really don't."

* * *

In the morning, after he's shaved, and bathed at the sink in his room, and dressed, Sam knocks on Dean's door. Dean answers looking like he's done much the same.

Sam hefts the duffel he's carrying onto his shoulder. "Do you want to hit the road?"

Dean steps out into the hallway beside him without looking back.

* * *

They take random cases, pretty much whatever crops up in the papers wherever they happen to be. None of it's particularly challenging, but the way they're hunting now, it probably wouldn't matter if it were.

They move together. They think together. They move together without having to think, communication so instant and noiseless it isn't communication at all. It's the quantum link between two entangled particles, something written in whatever's at the bottom of the universe, and when they are like this, they are gods on Earth. They don't discuss the fact. It's so certain it's irrelevant.

They've reached this state before—at their best, at their worst, at moments out of the blue—but this is the longest and most sustained it's ever lasted. As the weather starts to warm and the skies grow with light, it's easy to believe it will never break.

It does, though.

* * *

They're hunting a poltergeist. Poltergeists are nasty, no two ways; Sam never met one with a trace of mythos, but they're one of those facts of life whose banality takes nothing from their lethality. They use the environment around them, is the thing with poltergeists. There's nothing to aim at, really; they're an infection that sets into the walls and commands everything inside, and the only way to survive is speed and dodging.

That's no problem for them like they are now. It's flat-out fun.

The poltergeist flings a drawer of knives. Dean opens the refrigerator door into their path. Sam dives for the west wall at the same time, blowing a hole in it with his shotgun as he goes.

He aimed the shot midway up the wall, because the bottom half is clad in thick, oak wainscoting. This means Sam needs to get up from the floor in order to shove the purification bag into the hole. He rolls to his knees with the same momentum that took him across the floor, and black slams across his vision as his blood pounds in his ears.

"Sammy!"

He's on his back. The headrush is worse than it's ever been. Dean is distracted. Something splinters.

Sam blinks but he can't see shit. He winds up and throws the hex bag at the wall. Nothing happens. He's just able to see the bag bounce off the wall in outline and barely able to hear it hit the carpeting. He rolls toward it, but too slowly. There's a tremendous shattering of glass and wood and Dean shouts in agony.

Moving feels like wading upstream through a strong river. Sam gets the hex bag in his hand, gets to his knees, and gets the bag in the hole in the same instant a force grabs onto his ankles and yanks. There's an outward rush of light, a metalic _whannng,_ and the poltergeist's final wail, and Sam lands hard on his face as the force vanishes. He starts crawling toward where he last saw his brother, but the harder he pushes, the harder the vertigo pushes back.

"Dean? Dean!"

Sam blinks the last of the static from his eyes. Dean groans from where he's lying in a pile of cabinet and crockery.

"Shit." Sam gets his feet under himself finally and stumbles across the room as fast as he can.

Blood is pouring from a gash somewhere in Dean's hair, and there's a chunk of Corningware sticking out of his arm that stops Sam's breath. Extracting it is going to be nasty, but a different roll of the dice could have put it through his neck. Yet the expression on Dean's face when he lifts his head isn't pain, but fear, and that makes no sense.

"Don't worry, I torched it." Sam pats frantically under his brother's jacket to check for injuries he can't see.

"Yeah," Dean says, eyes locked on something over Sam's shoulder, and Sam finally twists around to look at what he's fixated on.

There's a cookie sheet, of all things, embedded neatly in the plaster over the wainscoting. Had Sam fallen half a second later, it would have decapitated him.

Dean's lips are white. "No more," he says.

Sam feels wrong inside, buzzing and hollow in a way that his adrenaline can sustain him through but not obscure. In the most recent tide, something vital has come free and washed away; he's turned some corner he didn't even know awaited him, and though he's always known where this was going, this time he can feel it.

Hunting's over for him. He could get Dean killed like this.

"Okay," he says.

Sam's inability to watch his back isn't what Dean's complaining about, of course. He's pulling the plug because he's terrified for Sam's safety. Sam's agreeing because he can't keep Dean safe. The mootness of both points somehow changes nothing for either of them.

In their motel room, he manages to get Dean patched up, but his hands shake and the worst ones will scar. The minute Sam ties off the last suture, Dean stands up and starts manhandling him toward the bathroom.

"Dean, what the hell?"

"You're fucking freezing," Dean says grimly.

This is true, it turns out. Sam has been too distracted by all the blood to notice, but at least some of his shaking is shivering, and he feels like a half-thawed turkey inside.

All the same, he's not in the mood for mother-henning. "I'm fine," he says, yanking his arm free of Dean's grasp.

"You're dying, Sam!"

Sam rounds on him. "You think I don't know that?"

"I think you don't care!"

"No, you don't," Sam says. "You just think you can get me to cave if you guilt-trip me enough. We've come this far, and you still think that."

Sam thought he was done with anger. When he woke up in the bunker's hallway, a puddle of vomit a few yards distant, the brother who'd drugged him just out of arm's reach, he said to himself, _Well._ And then he moved on, because time was short. The fury, the betrayal, the utter failure to be surprised: he set them aside.

Or he thought he did. They come surging up now, so fast and hard Sam feels like he's been slapped in the face, although Dean's the one who looks like it when Sam shoves him backwards into the main room.

Dean recovers fast, though. "Oh, man, the martyr complex on you," he says. "The _hypocrisy._ How many times have you put the whole fucking world on the hook because you didn't feel like letting me follow through with something _I_ decided? And every single time, Sam, every time, it's the speeches, the 'how can you give up now'; it's you trying to tell me I'm the weak one for trying to do the right thing. Now there is nothing on the line, _nothing,_ and you're just gonna stand in the middle of the train tracks and wait. And I think you expect me to pity you for it."

Sam hears him, but he doesn't care. The rage he feels is both consuming and sustaining. "So drug my coffee next, why don't you," he says. "Roofie my road food, or are you all out of date rape juice? What were you going to use before you stopped? Your hands? Your mouth? A fucking fleshlight?"

Dean snarls, swings a fist. Sam catches it and yanks him in. Dean hooks an ankle around Sam's and jerks. They go down on a bed.

They roll, biting and rutting. Dean's already hard in his jeans, Sam in his, or close enough in their depleted states. Dean hisses when Sam's teeth tear one of his stitches. He wrenches them onto their sides and bites hard over Sam's neck and collarbone, fists the shirt down to pinch an ugly purple welt over Sam's heart with his teeth. Sam digs his bootheel into Dean's tailbone, accompanies it with a short, sharp thrust of his hips hard enough to hurt. Lust potentiates fury potentiates lust.

When Dean goes for Sam's mouth, then Sam finally shoves him off. Dean stumbles but catches himself and manages to stand in the middle of the room. "That's not what's happening," Sam tells him. He gets to his feet, too.

Dean stands there, hair askew, panting. Sam stands there, far enough away, the same.

"Take your fucking clothes off," Sam says.

Dean does it. He kicks off his boots and shucks his shirt and jeans, cheeks flushed, blood smeared dilute orange over pale skin. His dick's erect.

Seeing your brother naked is nothing after seeing your brother dead. Once you've moved him, and stripped him, and washed him, nothing else compares for intimacy. There's a reason why there isn't supposed to be anything else after that.

Never mind waking up and knowing he's done it for you.

"Get on the bed."

Sam unbuckles his belt as he approaches and stands over his brother, fly undone. "You want revenge?" Something's coursing through his veins that's lain dormant since the night he killed what took his brother to Hell. "You can have it. I'll tell you exactly what I _would_ do."

A wordless sound claws its way out of Dean's mouth.

"Touch yourself," Sam orders, disguising neither his irritation nor his impatience. Dean wraps a hand hard around his bare shaft; Sam shoves his own hand down his pants, where Dean can't see.

"I'd do everything, Dean." Dean's hand strips up and down, punching noises out of his throat. "I'd bite you where everyone could see. Not a hickey but a scar. I'd bite you right above your dick so you'd have to look at it every time you took a piss." Dean's jerking himself so hard it looks painful, eyes clenched shut. "Don't you dare slow down. I'd lay on you and jack us both; you know my hands are big enough. I'd fuck your thighs and come all over your junk. I'd fuck you raw till you came and keep on going just to watch your face. I'd suck you for hours and drink you down, again and again and again, like you were the best demon I ever had, and then I'd open myself up on your fist and let you try to win it back. I'd go to my knees for you. I'd get on my front for you. I'd let you leave yourself inside me."

Dean comes with a sound that's half furious, half mortally wounded. Sam watches him shoot all over himself, back arching, thighs flexing, ass rising up off the mattress. He pinches the base of his own dick tight.

As Dean comes down his ribcage heaves, harsh breaths interspersed with what sound more like sobs although they aren't, quite. His torso is streaked with come, his face with tears. His eyes are shut. Sam looks down at him with a combination of emotions too complicated to act on: triumph, regret, tenderness, bitterness, despair, wonder, and what is unquestionably the most thought-obliterating arousal of his life, which he isn't going to do anything about.

Somehow what he says is, "That's for the fucking soup."

A laugh breaks out between Dean's not-sobs. He opens his eyes and locks them on Sam, who finds himself grinning, too.

Dean's voice has been destroyed. "Always knew you had a vindictive streak in you, Sammy."

"You don't know the half of it." But maybe Dean finally does.

* * *

Sam can't get warm. Despite taking the hot shower Dean wanted him to, followed by a hot bath, followed by hot liquids, he still feels slushy-cold inside. Finally he gave up on getting it to go away and just went to bed, and that's where he is now.

He can hear Dean in the other one. He can't feel Dean's body heat, but he can imagine it, oh-so-clearly. And, of course, it's more than that that he wants.

"I want to get in with you." Sam keeps the blankets fisted tight around himself; Dean went to the motel office to get him extra. "I really, really— I wish I could."

He hears Dean swallow, but Dean doesn't say something like, _You can do it any time you want._ He knows that's not what Sam's getting at.

"This sucks," Sam whispers.

An unsteady laugh. "Yeah."

"Just—why couldn't it have been something else? _Anything_ else." He bites his lip to stop it wobbling.

He thinks he's been doing pretty well on avoiding self-pity for most of this, but he has his limits, sue him.

"Sammy." The blankets rustle, and then Dean's kneeling in the gap between the beds. His hands stroke over the bit of Sam's head poking out, petting his hair, and it feels so good that Sam can't help but lean into it. "Sammy…."

"Don't," Sam says. "Don't, or I'll—"

Dean stops, and after a moment he takes his fingers away. "Okay," he says, softly.

* * *

One day, very early in the morning, Sam tells Dean, "It's tonight."

The lights are on because the sun's not up yet. Dean looks as though he's hardly slept. He has hardly slept. He looks at Sam, eyes flicking up and down. It's a long time before he says, "What do you want to do today?"

Sam wraps his hands around the motel's paper coffee cup. He's wearing every layer he's got. "Drive."

They do.

The sun comes up while they're leaving city limits of the place where they just were. Sam's not totally sure where that is. Nowhere important, certainly.

They stop long enough for gas and hot coffee, but other than that, they keep moving. There's no point in hitting a diner. The open road, though—that's still glorious. Sam likes knowing it will still be there when they're both gone.

They pick the roads that look good, not the ones that go places. A tree that Sam likes the look of is good enough for Dean. The Impala hums. They don't talk a lot. Dean sings him snatches of Lynyrd Skynyrd, now and again.

The sun is warm. The earth smells fertile. It's a nice day.

Sam has no idea where they are when the sun starts going down. Dean might not know himself. There's lots of fields around. Corn's coming up in them.

When twilight settles in, when all the light that's left is indirect leavings spread over the mist on the ground, Sam says, tentatively, "Can we pull over?"

Dean's jaw clenches and works. He keeps driving, but after a minute, he says, "Sure, Sammy."

He puts on the indicator and glides the car into a generous shoulder beside some early corn. He puts the car in park. Then he turns it off.

With the heater gone, Sam immediately starts shivering. "Shit, sorry—" Dean says.

"No, it's okay," says Sam. "Leave it off."

The windows are cracked. It's warm outside. Sam knows it is, even if he can't feel it; he can hear as much by the frogs and crickets that are slowly waking.

Hands still on the wheel, Dean takes a deep breath and lets it out. Then he turns and roots around in the backseat, where he put all the sleeping bags and blankets this morning. He stuffs them around Sam until Sam stops shivering. Sam's still cold, but it's down to levels where he can manage it.

They've got a while.

"Tell me a story," Sam begs. "Tell me Sir Galahad."

The light's not dim enough to totally hide how Dean's face crumples. "Sammy—"

"Please."

Dean dashes a hand over the cheek that's farthest from Sam and stares out the windshield at where the fading line of the road disappears into the future. His voice is steady when he begins, "In the days when knights were brave and ladies were hot, but, like, classy, King Arthur called all the best knights in the kingdom to sit at his Round Table and go on quests and stuff like that.

"They were badasses, Sammy. They were the biggest badasses ever to be bad in a whole world of bad. They weren't as cool as us, obviously, but these guys lived in a world with magic and supernatural evil, just like us. Saving a princess from a fire-breathing dragon was just a regular Saturday night for these guys, and when they were done, they'd head on down to King Art's Round Table for a cold one and some pizza, or whatever they ate in those days."

Sam's very cold now. It rocks his body like a hand; the Impala's door cradles his back.

"But there was always this one chair that was empty, 'cause nobody dared sit in it. It was called the Siege Perilous. No idea why. I mean, it was perilous to sit there, obviously, had big letters on it that said so, but don't ask me about the siege thing. Merlin warned all the knights never to sit in it, because it was waiting for somebody special."

"Then what?" Sam asks. He can't feel any warmth from the sleeping bags, but he can't feel his shoulder either.

"Then one day Sir Lancelot—he was the baddest of them, also a bit of a ladies' man, you know how it is, kicking ass in style but a little too much thinking with the downstairs brain—was approached by a boy out in the woods. He said he wanted to be a knight, just like Sir Lancelot. Nobody knew where he came from, but after he proved his stuff, Lancelot said okay, come on down to the Round Table and we'll get you set up.

"Meanwhile King Arthur was sad. He had all these knights, and they were famous everywhere for all the cool stuff they'd done, but none of them had ever found the Holy Grail. So imagine his surprise when Lancelot and Galahad walk in, and Merlin takes Galahad straight to the Siege Perilous and tells him it's been waiting for him.

"They all sit down, and—you ready for this?—the lights go out and the Holy Grail appears. It's just hovering in midair, shining, but none of them can see it clearly because there's a sheet over it. Like a ghost cup. It's basically a ghost cup. All the knights instantly swear that they're going to go on a quest to find it. I dunno, maybe they figure they need to salt and burn it."

"How long is the quest?"

Quiet. Then a long, wet sniff. "A year and a day."

Sam's teeth are chattering. He can't prevent that anymore. "What hap— What h-happens—"

Dean is grappling him up, pulling him into his arms. Sam's limbs don't seem to function when he tries to assist, but that doesn't slow Dean down any; he pulls Sam into his lap and against his front, one arm around his shoulders, and stuffs the covers back around them both. Sam flattens his hand against Dean's chest. Dean's not wearing a jacket. Shockingly, he's warm. The ability to register external temperatures has been retreating for days; Sam couldn't feel the last cup of coffee or the Impala's heater on max, but he can feel Dean.

"Does he find it?" Sam asks. "Does he find the Holy Grail?"

"Sammy, I have no goddamned idea."

"Do you think I could ever go on a quest like that?"

"I wish you wouldn't. I really, really wish you wouldn't."

"Come with me."

"Little brother, I'm always with you."

"I know."

"I'll give you twenty questions."

Winchester rules: only things that do not exist.

"Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

Dean's laugh is harsh with what's gathering in his sinuses. "Not animal, not vegetable, not mineral. Not anything, not fuckin _anything,_ baby brother."

_Sammy. It's me without you, Sammy._

Fuck the rules.

"I'll give you one," Sam says. "This one really exists, Dean."

The wet end of Dean's nose is in his hair. "Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

"You get that one for free."

"Noun or verb?"

"Both. But the verb is more important."

"Where is it?"

"Here." Sam fists his hand in Dean's shirtfront. "Dean, it's right here."

Dean chokes out one wet, suppressed sob. What's coming out of his face soaks into Sam's hair. "Sam."

Sam's tongue isn't really working anymore. It's a challenge to say, "Think I'm falling asleep."

Dean's arms tighten and press Sam harder into the spot over his heart. "Goodnight, Sammy."

"'Night, Dean."

Dean's voice is almost unintelligible through the crying. "I'll see you in the morning."

Sam's last thought is, _Yes._

**Author's Note:**

> [A playlist, if you're into that sort of thing](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL317ASATFFa1DsEIri8RLCfrKQp3c_kr1) | [Galahad's quest, from _Classics Illustrated_ #108 (June 1953)](https://road-rhythm.livejournal.com/37970.html)


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